Delhi a wonderland, officials a pack of playing cards
To allay the misery of citizens, who have been made to wade through slush in the knee-deep potholes of Delhi roads day after during the past month, the Delhi government has come up with what they think is a great idea. They plan to involve Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) to track waterlogging in the city.
A report in a national daily said, “In a recently held meeting regarding waterlogging, desilting, and drainage management, Chief Secretary Naresh Kumar (has since retired) directed the Irrigation and Flood Control Department (I&FC) to explore the ‘use of ISRO’s high-resolution maps to gain access to detailed images of the drains of Delhi’.”If the city government continues to work the way it is working right now, we would also need ISRO’s maps to track where the roads in the national Capital are.
Forget about the internal roads, even the city’s life line thoroughfares – the Ring Road and the Outer Ring road are pox faced today with potholes. The government plans to start quantity survey of silts in the drains from October 15, after the monsoon winds have withdrawn from the city.
This implies that for the remaining part of this year’s monsoon one would be left to wade and splash through the cesspools of slush across the city, whose administrators never cease to claim about the metropolis having world class infrastructure. Their claims and plans can best be explained in a medical term that is the government being in the state of dysmetropsia.
This medical term has also been defined as Alice in Wonderland syndrome, and is a neurological disorder that distorts perception. People with this syndrome experience distortions in their visual perception of objects, such as appearing smaller or larger, or appearing to be closer or farther than they are.
‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ (also known as Alice in Wonderland) is an 1865 English children’s novel by Lewis Carroll, a mathematics don at the University of Oxford. It details the story of a girl named Alice who falls through a rabbit hole into a fantasy world of anthropomorphic creatures. It is seen as an example of the literary nonsense genre.
Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities. The actions of Delhi governmentthe past decade could well be explained as the opposite of Anthropomorphism, where the humans have been behaving in the most non-human and silly ways, making life in the city absolutely miserable.
The Wonderland is described to be “ruled by the Queen of Hearts with the playing cards being her guards.” The novel encapsulates ‘irrationality’ which pervades through the wonderland.
The news report, which one had mentioned right at the beginning, also mentioned that the flood control department has prepared a preliminary estimate of Rs 404.60 crore for desilting. After having lived through the misery of monsoon, the tax-payers’ money would be pilfered on the survey of silt which mostly has been has been washed away by the rains.
Its common knowledge that nobody cleans the drains of the national Capital than the gushing waters of the rains.The use of space technology where legwork is required would do no good to the city. If the state of water logging is to be known, the Delhi Traffic Police has released report which mentions that there has been 50 percent rise in the critical water logging spots in Delhi.
The residents would tell you if he drains have been cleaned or not. The utterly incompetent and corrupt civic officials can be made to confess if they carried out the job of desilting the drains. They could be taken to task for not doing their job.
To make the government machinery function, one doesn’t need high resolution pictures from Indian Space Research Organisation. One needs to just put the house in order. But then Delhi government officials, as Lewis Carroll said in the famous novel, are just the pack of playing cards.
Sidharth Mishra
Author and president, Centre for Reforms, Development & Justice