An emerging economy which is incapable of taking care of as simple a matter as underground drainage and its safety measures, is something India is. It is also something to immediately come out of
And yet again, an uncovered pit in capital city’s Neb Sarai sucked an innocent 30-year-old last weekend, drowning dreams of a poor family. By now the hapless populace has been left to just wring their hands in despair. Have we forgotten, among many others, the three-year-old toddler Kiran swept in an uncovered running drain in November last in Shriniwaspuri, or the four-year-old child drowning dead in an open septic tank in a school premises in Swaroop Nagar a month earlierIJ On the heat of the moment following these heart-rending incidents, some swift deterrence is promised by National Capital Territory (NCT) Government, as in the case of drowning of a class I student at a school in Vasant Kunj, also like a similar tragic end of the five-year-old Ankit’s life in a septic tank at his Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) school in Kapashera. But want of any deterrent, exemplary punitive action results in business as usual to carry on.
Imagine a country with pretensions of an emerging world power, where children and elders in particular routinely bear the brunt of drains and sewers left uncovered, electric wires left hanging loose, and numerous similar hazards. Didn’t we lose some sleep at the lackadaisical oversight and surveillance even at high security installations, as at Pathankot airbase and Uri brigade headquarters, which came under terrorist attacksIJ
Thomas l Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum narrate how simple small weaknesses in everyday avocations of workers are symptomatic of nation’s malaise. Their book, That Used To Be Us: What Went Wrong with America — and How It Can Come Back, laments the apathetic work ethos visible, for example, in the two short escalators at the Bethesda station near New York they saw, which had been under repair for nearly six months. A sign on the closed escalator pompously announced that its repairs were part of “a massive escalator modernization project!” In startling contrast, the authors recall what they saw in China: It took just 32 weeks to build a large world-class convention centre from the ground up, not to talk of, among others, China’s ‘bullet’ trains zipping through the countryside developed at amazing pace. They conclude, “Americans had gone soft. It has become a nation of wusses”.
If Americans have gone soft, we shudder to believe how Indians will be described, known for messing things, their penchant at jugaad, somehow fixing things together, majority of them oblivious of essential attributes of safety, quality, productivity, and timeliness. Not unoften our cities grapple with traumas such as buildings and flyovers under construction falling apart and burying hapless people underneath or an Uphaar blaze in Delhi or AMRI inferno in Kolkata. Come monsoon downpours, Delhi gets paralysed by water-logging year after year, much like monsoon-lashed Mumbai turns into a familiar cesspool along with its pot-holed roads and grid-locked traffic. Notwithstanding the crescendo of Swachch Bharat Abhiyan, our urban agglomerations continue to be pigsties, with ubiquity of filth and squalor, people spitting, littering, urinating, defecating anywhere, everywhere, anytime. Foul smell oozing out of piles of trash in close vicinity greets tourists even to the world renowned Taj Mahal in Agra.
Our hallowed Ganga and Yamuna, much like most other rivers and lakes, are now veritable sewage canals. Our roads, broken and cratered, in most places even in the capital city, save the few in the lutyens zone, with no traffic law, are virtual death traps. Roads laid and carpeted melt away in weeks along with the bitumen; ever sprouting slums grow cheek by jowl with glittering malls and multiplexes; thousands of unauthorised settlements keep springing up. Rape of the ridge and onslaughts on monuments of heritage go on with impunity. Simple imperatives are ignored, for instance, roads and streets to be kept clean; drains desilted; garbage cleared; walkways left uncluttered; busy market places made orderly, clean and convenient; pavements and streets not allowed to be overrun by hawkers, squatters, shrines or kiosks.
A familiar phenomenon is of multiple state agencies passing the buck. Those who can make a difference remain enwrapped in their own privileged citadels. While there is little supervision by officers and managers at actual work sites, the growing scourge of VIP syndrome insulates those in power and authority from ground realities and situations. Far removed from the humdrum life of the country’s teeming millions, our legislators and bureaucrats increasingly draw people’s ire and angst because they cannot really comprehend their trials and travails. The VIP viral afflicting the polity becomes the very antithesis of inclusiveness by which all political satraps swear and make a mockery of the democracy we are proud of.
The rot runs deep; it has thrived for decades. Our multi-layered governance leviathan remains immune; there is no clear accountability, no swift, deterrent punitive action, as witnessed even in rapidly occurring cases of ghastly brutalisation of girls, except at best a subterfuge of some lowly functionaries placed under suspension — to ward off the media onslaught and public outrage. The political class consumed by competitive populism and ideology of entitlements abdicate their primary obligation of rajdharma, harmonising liberty and welfare with fair and firm governance and order. Human capital is the key for development, for quality of life.
It is not only the case of untrained artisans, of inept application and carelessness. A vast number of people have been fed on doctrinaire paralysis of work culture, encouraging sloth. There is a general impression generated that no matter how heinous a crime one may commit, nothing much will happen; that’s how umpteen cases of rape, abduction, extortion, graft, road-mowing, and murder keep happening. With more than 30 million cases pending in courts, up to 26 years old, it takes an average of 17 years to get a judicial decision.
Mancur Olson explains in The Rise and Decline of Nations, a strange paradox, how the British, after winning World War II, grew comfortable, complacent and rigid, focusing on distribution rather than growth, the system becoming sclerotic, whereas Germany, almost entirely destroyed by the war, rebuilt not only its physical infrastructure but also revised its antiquated arrangements and institutions — the political system, the guilds, the economy — with a more modern frame of mind. There is this clear categorical imperative for India to eschew the soft option, and instead, to tread a path that Germany chose, for it to be adapted to the challenges the nation encounters, we can expiate our criminal negligence leading to loss of innocent little lives, if we learn the lesson even at this late stage and usher in some semblance of good governance to our long suffering people.
(The writer is senior fellow, Asian Institute of Transport Development and commentator on social issues)