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July 24, 2000
Our chalta hai attitude towards civic problems must change
Is it my imagination or do the rains get more ferocious with each passing year? Last week’s downpour was of course at crisis levels with reports claiming a record high since 1974. The authorities were as usual, ill prepared and much has been written about the failure of the Disaster Management Plan and the high death toll so far reveals how serious the consequences can be. But we do not need a crisis to show up our inadequacies. Even under normal circumstances there is a glaring lack of foresight and preparedness. Last month early showers rendered the subway leading to the Santacruz airport unusable on a busy morning.
It took an hour longer than usual to cross over to the east. A passenger would have missed his flight. At present a massive ditch has opened up on the road outside the Bandra Fire Exchange below the new flyover. It forms every year. It is a junction increasingly used for traffic heading to and from the Western suburbs. Will anything be done about it? Of course not.
The cars will continue to inch their way around it causing jams and delays and foul tempers. Every year people fall seriously ill. And even on days when the rain is in a mild mode one finds stretches of road submerged in gutter water. It is easy to blame the government and our crumbling infrastructure as we should. But the truth is that as a society we have a fatalistic. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the lack of information. Last year, a couple of colleagues and I were about to drive from Washington D.C. to New York when news came in of disruptions caused by an unexpected deluge.
Within seconds phone calls had been made to the relevant departments and someone was on the net getting details of routes and bottlenecks. Now one can be dismissive of rich countries and their resources but the one thing we have no dearth of is media outlets. Fifty television channels, newspapers, web sites, radio - and not one place where you can expect an reliable hourly account of conditions in the city. But why blame the media - even the chief minister confessed to have been unaware that the trains had stopped running till reporters failed to turn up for a briefing on the day of the downpour. A few days ago this newspaper also carried a report on the poor quality of information on the BMC’s official website. Perhaps this is a hangover from the days of Indira Gandhi when every movement was a state secret to be revealed under pain of death. Why else would routine information that could help citizens plan their moves be so hard to come by?
The truth is that the one thing guaranteed to make a bad situation unbearable is the feeling that one doesn’t know what is going on. The spate of violent incidents at railway stations a couple of years ago amply proved that. There is so much that can be done to correct this. By the authorities. By private parties. In the early days of cable an operator in the Vasant Kunj area in Delhi was routinely approached by local agencies such as the police to flash news of wanted criminals and so on and he willingly obliged to the point that when the colony taps ran dry residents besieged him demanding to know why the news hadn’t been conveyed on cable.
Change however would require first of all a transformation in the way information is perceived. Information is crucial. Information is to be shared. People want information. This last is for the veejays and deejays that have invaded our lives. Cut out the giggles and the countdowns. Tell us things that matter to us as a city.
Updated Fortnightly
The writer is former editor of Elle.
Other columnists:
| M.V.Kamath |