Our roads: a metaphor for our democracy, with its potholes

Our roads: a metaphor for our democracy, with its potholes
The similarities are endless, especially the sense of lack of ownership, public tolerance for wrongs ranging from corruption to bad planning

Financial Express

My drive from home to work takes me from a north Bangalore suburb through the city’s vast tracts of public sector land, past some of the famous universities and research establishments, cuts across a busy national highway, squeezes under the tracks by the train station before ending at a narrow lane off a busy downtown street.

The trip has taken increasingly more time over the years —as it has for most Bangaloreans—with one of the few saving graces being that it provides much time for introspection. On one such trip, I was struck by how so many aspects about our roads and what happen on them are actually a window into our democracy, like an everyday humanscale reminder of a larger and deeper canvas.

There are 4,500 kilometres of roads in Bangalore, but only two-thirds of them are asphalted; the narrow lanes where the poor live haven’t seen a coat of tar or a streetlight in years, often decades. Our democracy, too, still hasn’t reached out to all—there are large numbers of Indians for whom basic rights are still a dream—the nomads, for example, who have to fundamentally alter their way of life to even be recognised as voters in a constituency.

The variety of vehicles make any Indian city street a mobility bazaar—cycle rickshaw holding up the chauffeur-driven Mercedes, overloaded Maruti challenging an overbearing city bus; all jostling each other in a display of democratic interdependence, with space being made for all, and the more powerful managing to get more space.

Look carefully and you can see the corruption as well—the recently-laid road surface with an anemic coat of blacktop that wouldn’t survive the next monsoon. We see this evidence everywhere, but register and dismiss the data, recollecting vaguely that only 15 paisa of every rupee of public expenditure actually reaches the ground, a facile Indian explanation which generates that universal Indian response —the shrug and the upward-facing hands.

In our democracy, we sometimes see different arms of government unable to work with each other, and indeed, sometimes undermining each other. On our city roads as well, we see the municipality finish laying the road one day, only to have the water board cut it open the next.

As for traffic rules, we see the the law-abiders dwindle to a minority as the law-breakers get away scot-free. This could be termed the “tipping point of violation”: unless there is credible enforcement, there will not be substantial compliance. No wonder our courts are jammed with cases that remain unresolved for decades, and the judicial system is often used to delay rather than deliver justice.

The line between private and public property is blurred in India. All varieties of properties, residential to commercial, encroach onto the public road space, as though it is their own. Lost in the melee is the irony of finding no issue with usurping a tiny slice of real estate for oneself, while expressing outrage at the violations being perpetrated by every one else.

Nothing possibly captures the similarity between our roads and our democracy better than the temple in the middle of the road. It is a remarkable sight: one can almost visualise the pattern of growth that engulfed the temple, with the road snaking up to it, gradually encircling it, and hoping to eventually choke it out. And yet it survives, a resolute reminder of a different way of life, a complete eco-system transported in time.

To those who believe that unbridled economic growth alone is sufficient to yank us into the developed world, the presence of this “obstacle” is stupefying: “How can we allow this to happen, how can we ever progress like this?” Maybe, the temple is a reminder that the road of economic growth that we are rushing on eventually leads nowhere unless we are able to carry all with us, even those whose views we are not able to fully comprehend.

The similarities are endless, continuing to our response as well. Most of us suffer silently, cooped in our self-created urban cocoons—in the overcrowded bus or the airconditioned car, millions of human pressure cookers gathering steam. But somehow we are not able to come together to claim ownership over the road and say: “This is ours, and we are going to fix the problem”.

While we all feel the pain of poor roads — lack of planning, bad design, poor execution, minimal legal compliance — and while we can all see the effects of patronage and self-interest, we still do not see the problem as our own. The good news is that it is happening in little bits—in stretches of a few kilometres here, a few hundred yards somewhere else, with small groups of people finding common ground and claiming ownership.

And wherever they have done this, the effects are visible to all, with benefits for all—clean roads, better compliance, fewer accidents. So there you have it—this chaotic, multi-coloured, maddening, almost-on-the-verge-of-collapse-but-amazingly-still-working democracy, sorry city road of ours!

I am caught in a nasty traffic jam, as I think about this. It seems that we are going to be stuck here, going nowhere for a long while. But I am hopeful that we will move soon, and reach our destination.