Ishan looks at the state of our public infrastructure

Ishan looks at the state of our public infrastructure, and wonders if we ought to look inwards before blaming everything on the authorities.

The thought occurred to me just the other day on the way to work – triggered by an incident that I witness regularly, perhaps even everyday. Around where I live, there’s a main road that’s 150-200 feet wide. Now, on one side is a major market, and on the other side a huge mall. Of course, as you can imagine, at any time of the day or night, there are dozens of people trying to get from one side of the road to the other. And since this is an arterial road, there’s always a high volume of traffic – usually plying at a high rate of speed. So, as you could well imagine, when the road and the shopping destinations first opened, there was no way to go across other than to weave your way through traffic and risk life and limb. And a risk it was too, as a few people even lost their lives in the process.

Naturally, the authorities took their own sweet time to wake up to the danger. Eventually, they built a state-of-the-art foot-over bridge – with escalators on both ends, no less – to enable people to safely cross over. Now, any rational person would think that the authorities had done their job – right?

But, everyday on my commute, with much anger and frustration, I still watch people trying to cross the same road by dodging traffic instead of using the excellent bridge, which I’ve used and can confirm is world-class in design and execution. And its not like these are uneducated folks who don’t know any better. Everyday, I see a flock of well-dressed young people who look like they might be in college, and even young professionals, who prefer to risk their lives rather than take the sensible and much safer way across.

I’ve tried to think of all the possible reasons that could lead people to being so foolhardy. The only logical conclusion that I could think of is a total disregard for the rules, and a complete lack of civic sense in our society in general. So, why blame the authorities when we ourselves refuse to take advantage of the facilities created for our own safety? And we witness this everyday on our roads – driving on the wrong side, jumping traffic signals, swapping lanes, overloading vehicles, jaywalking, and worse. It seems that rather than just being an infrastructure issue, it’s more of an endemic problem that stems from our general attitude towards rules and our reluctance to follow them.

You could be fooled into believing this is the result of a lack of education and driver training, but that doesn’t hold true to for the educated urbanites who are just as guilty of breaking the rules as anyone else. When I’ve questioned some of my own friends on what leads them to break rules with such impunity and put their own lives at risk – the reply is unanimous, because everyone else does it. And since we observe others breaking the rules, we do it too – because, if everyone else is doing it, that makes it justifiable. Essentially, the crux of the problem is that everyone wants to take the shortcut – no one wants to stand up for what’s correct. That, I think, is the reason for our leadership in the number of road accidents and deaths seen around the world – and it’s unlikely to be relinquished anytime soon, because a vast majority of us are more interested in finding the shortcut, rather than following the rules and doing our little bit to establish some kind of order on our roads.

So, before you start laying the blame on the footsteps of the establishment, ask yourself if you bother to follow the rules before pointing fingers at others.