Congested roads; potholed roads; littered public spaces; thoughtlessly designed flyovers and subways; lack of proper signage for road directions or information; public urination and spitting… the list goes on and on. This is our city — Namma Bengaluru.
Reams have been written about it, but a solution fails to rise over the horizon. Only suggestions and ideas keep floating, which seem great, but whether they would help, and in what way, remains unclear. It is only making the average Bengalurean more cynical over the “hell hole” we have allowed to be created to live in.
Take congested roads, for instance. On Thursday, Mohandas Pai, Chairman, Manipal Global Education Services (MaGE) and advisor, Manipal Education & Medical Group (MEMG), who is also the former Chief Financial Officer of Infosys, suggested creating a “digital twin” of Bengaluru to track road congestion over the last five years, study the causes, and analyse them.
This would reveal where the “hot spots” are in the city, why traffic jams occur, and come up with solutions to prevent congestion on the roads in future. A great idea, which Pai floated at the Move In Sync Mobility Symposium 2024, held in Bengaluru on Thursday, attended by industry leaders, dignitaries, policymakers, among others with an eye on finding mobility solutions for the city.
Why just road congestion, any of the problems mentioned can be addressed nowadays using technology to map, analyse and then find solutions for them — at least idealistically or theoretically. Putting the solutions into practice however is, and will, remain a big challenge — seemingly almost impossible to overcome.
But let’s not get bogged down assuming it’s impossible. We know it is possible to overcome these and put solutions in place. You know why? Because the solutions are in us, and should come from us — we the people. Like the push that the citizens and experts, including Pai, made at the Move In Sync Mobility Symposium on Thursday.
There’s also another reason — and a crucial one — why solutions have to come from “we the people”. While most of the potential solutions are in us, most of the civic problems too originate in us. Either we are directly responsible due to the lack of proper civic behaviour, or indirectly responsible due to our own apathy and indifference towards pressing for our rightful demands for proper civic infrastructure persistently and forcefully, albeit in a civil manner.
The latter especially holds true for scientifically laying footpaths, well-designed and sturdy, durable roads; for flyovers that help decongest rather than pose as bottlenecks; for subways that do not flood and claim lives; for signage that do not confuse; for proper street-lighting; for uninterrupted water and power supply; and for security.
But if and when we are granted these, we are directly to blame for our lack of proper civic behaviour, which results in congested roads, littered public spaces, and unhygienic public spaces due to acts of spitting, urinating and nose-blowing, which are among the most disgusting to sight and mind.
It must be remembered that no amount of impressive planning, which may appear sophisticated, can rid our civic problems if the citizen behaviour is not appropriate — not when it is at its nadir, as we daily witness in the city.
If Abraham Lincoln’s “Democracy is the government of the people, by the people and for the people” is true in the political sense, perfection in civic machinery and principles to are “of the people, by the people and for the people” — for which appropriate and responsible civic behaviour is imperative.
We keep our homes clean, spic-and-span as much as we can, but leave our civic sense locked behind when we step out. Prevailing civic infrastructure problems are merely complained about, without the citizens coming together and making forceful demands on the government and the civic agencies to ensure that the wrongs are corrected for the city to function smoothly. The need of the hour is for us citizens to step up our civic consciousness and conscience to push hard for what we need in our city — with or without the civic elections.
What holds good for Bengaluru today holds good for all other leading cities and towns in the state. It is only when citizens nurture a feeling of ownership of the city or town they live in and be empathetic towards each other while motoring, walking or going through their daily routines with a high degree of civic conscience, that can we take steps towards erasing the civic maladies that persist today. It is we who can do it!