Wednesday 16 September 2015

Civic Sense, will you please inhabit the Indian psyche?

What are the solutions to these ills in our society?

People drive through a red light because no other car sems to be making use of a green light?

There are no traffic lights with a green for pedestrians in major intersections?

If at all a city thought it fit to have reserved handicapped parking, some fat jerk, probably with connections among the rich and famous, shamelessly parks his car in one (or maybe even straddling two) of these reserved spots.

Even if a city corporation strives to have usable and wide pavements for the use of pedestrians, some studly motorcycle rider rides his bike up onto the pavement and parks it right across that pavement so no pedestrian can bypass this bike without some gymnastics that would make a Nadia Comenicii proud - people in wheelchairs, BAH!

People park bikes (motorised or otherwise) at the foot of the occasional ramp that might have been provided, thus rendering the ramp useless.

People wanting to turn rignt at an intersection with traffic lights happily wait at the top of the left-most lane, thereby forcing the would be left turner behind him to fret and fume when a free left turn light comes up and consequently being forced to wait as much as five minutes, till the unconditional green light comes around again and the insensitive driver can cut across traffic wanting to go straight, and the luckless left-turner will be permitted to go his way. The amazing thing is that this even happens the other way, with would-be left-turners waiting at the top of the right lane.

Buses are impossible for use by people with visibility or mobility impairment. They typically park briefly some fifty feet past the bus stop and ten feet from the pavement (into the road), and some twenty people run in a mad scramble to merely be able to grab some part of the bus and stand precariously on the steps before the bus zooms away even as people are trying to get on! How far is that from a society where the bus parks exactly in front of the bus stop and the driver lowers a mechanical lift to enable a wheelchair user to get into the bus and then personally comes by and locks the wheelchair into safety belts? How many more centuries before you can ever hope to see that happening in India?

Bottom line: until EVERYBODY respects the rights of EVERYBODY else, there is no use of building ramps, or `changing the very paradigms of skill training in terms of improving the pedagogy, introducing multi-dimensional technology that enables e-content solutions and improving the capacities of Institutions/NGOs offering skill training to PwDs' as a recent article in TOI glibly suggested.

Hon. PM Modiji, can you please stop traipsing all over the world, making grand speeches and initiating any number of new schemes with long Sanskrit names which will usher in the long advertised acche din, and GET REAL and make it possible for people like me to get out of our homes, on to the roads, and lead a `normal life'! While the news blares on and on about swachh bharat,  newspapers carry stories almost every day of people (`of a certain caste') dying due to suffocation by noxious fumes from sewers of shit they have to dive into to unclog them (for the sake of people of `higher' castes, who cannot do this work which is reserved for the aforementioned caste)!

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