LESS CARS;LESSER BABIES

PARKING PROBLEM – AN OFFSHOOT OF LOP-SIDED DEVELOPMENT

-SANJOG MAHESHWARI.

Though the third world war is certainly not going to be fought over the parking space- “water” being far more a serious contender- the already severely limited parking space in almost all the Metropolises, getting increasingly shrunk by the day, is sure going to cause nightmares to the harried citizens. Add to it the severely congested roads used by incessantly tensed drivers with frayed tempers, shouting and fighting all through the way to their destination and you get the big picture. The family would be thanking God for his small mercies, if their near and dear ones drive back home in one piece, even after being involved in an ugly incidence of road rage, accident and/ or a bloody brawl for the road-space- the things likely to become a matter of routine in not too distant future. One wonders, why the ever-rising graph of incidences of violent road-rage and fatal or near-fatal road- accidents does not ring alarm bells for the policy-planners and those in authority?

The neighbours fight like sworn enemies for limited parking space within block areas in residential colonies of big cities. Parks within them need to be reconverted into parking ground to meet the hugely increased demand for the parking space.

And now, with the small Nano and other small models, looming large all set to flood the vehicle market in a big way, the crisis will further deepen. Not only the arterial roads of the big cities but even the dirt roads of the countryside small towns and villages will get the taste of congestion, pollution and what not? Of course, the cash-rich farmers of the States in the neighbourhood of Delhi will continue to move in their swanky cars, as hitherto, but others will certainly go for Nano in a big way. Don’t be surprised if, some years from now, going for a morning walk, you are accosted by a beggar driving a second-third hand battered Nano, with his one hand on the steering wheel and the other jutted out of the window, holding a bowl thrust right under your nose: “Pitrool ke vaastey paisa dey dey, Baboo.” (Spare some money for filling the car, please).

The situation right now is very grim indeed. With the Nano and other newer models swarming down on the roads of our cities, like locusts, the bad will get to worse in near future. Less said about the spiraling atmospheric pollution, the better.Western countries have already labelled us as the bad boy of the climate change talks and are pressurizing us to cut down our greenhouse gas emissions As J.R.R Tolkien. aptly puts it in his book Lord of the Rings, we should "........uproot the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till". America has decided to take tough measures to tackle vehicular emissions. Those when implemented would reduce polluting emissions from vehicles by more than 1/3rd. And that would be equivalent to removing about 18 crore cars from the U.S. roads by 2016. Alarm bells are already ringing for our country, the world’s fifth largest Green House Gas emitter, responsible for about 6 percent of global emissions. Even so, here mere vehicle emission cuts won’t serve the purpose; even though per unit vehicular emission in our country averages substantially more than that of the U.S.A.This certainly, is not the type of growth or development that we should strive for. We should put a cap on car manufacture to curtail its production The dictates of the emerging situation are loud and clear: Far more than flyovers and roads, we need to create parking lots, not only in and around office-complexes but more so within residential colonies and blocks and that may entail converting many a city parks into parking-lots on priority, besides constructing multi-level parking facilities..

While the alarm bells have been ringing for quite sometime now, one wonders why the government and the policy planners are not hearing? Why are they not seeing the writing on the wall in bold relief and looking the other way when the urban landscape of the country is getting uglier by the day- chocked with mindless unplanned and grotesque development? All the big cities are bursting at their seams; severely straining the extremely fragile infrastructure. This prosperity for less than 10% has robbed the middle-class India off its tranquil, peaceful quality life infesting it instead with perpetual tension-filled days (and nights) with no respite in sight. The quality of life of middle-class India should not be sacrificed at the altar of higher and higher standard of living which unplanned development as ours ensures for the 10% rich of the country, who corner its 90% wealth while the teeming millions live below the poverty line. Thus broadly speaking, the quality of life of the nation as a whole deteriorates if the development is not tempered with equitable distribution on the national wealth as has been the case with our country ever since independence. As of now, consumerism and diabolical materialism reign supreme. If the ancient Indian wisdom and the accumulated experience of millennia are to be believed, happiness lies in minimizing the wants and, not in multiplying them.

Population explosion in a country as mismanaged and as misgoverned as India is akin to extending an open invitation to the ghost of Malthus which, even otherwise, resurrects here, off and on, in the form of deaths and devastation in terror attacks, endemics, epidemics, wars, pestilence, diseases, floods, accidents, poverty and starvation driven suicides, murders, pre-mature deaths ( our maternal and infant mortality rate is just about the highest in the world and the average life expectancy little over 60), increasing Naxalite- and now sitting at the doorstep the “Taliban” -insurgency and violence and endless such maladies so much so that human life has become the cheapest commodity in our country.

Only the rich and the politicians are benefited by the growth of human capital which they gleefully welcome. To the former it guarantees cheap labour-force and an inflated number of gullible consumers and to the latter a swelled minority (read Muslim) vote-bank. And all that at the cost of the poor and the middle-class whose poverty and miseries get compounded with each addition of an Australia every year to our population. No wonder, the rich and the politicians incessantly sing virtues of being “many” through their handsomely paid writers, ghost-writers and ever-obliging press and electronic media, caring a hoot for the miseries and depravities caused thereby to the remaining teeming millions.

Sadly, in the big cities and the Metropolises, the car has left the domain of being a luxury to become a necessity - a commodity needed for the very survival in an extremely busy city life. No more are they needed just for convenience and comfort, as used to be only a couple of decades back. No wonder, if the phenomenon of rear to rear driven cars in a lengthy beetle-like formation crawling their way on the busy city roads, all the time blenching volumes of carbon-dioxide and other poisonous gases in the atmosphere, honking and competing for every inch of the road space, soon becomes an unalterable part of the busy city life. Long traffic-jams and snarl-ups at every next turn of a road, are right now here to stay. Sad and lamentable; they call this horrible phenomenon:-“development” and every politician and political party swear by it.

While the government and all those policy-planners know it fully well that the root cause of all maladies is the unbridled growth of population, they seldom talk about it, let alone taking necessary measures to control it. Why the successive governments have been shying away from taking the most stringent measures that are urgently called for in order to contain and control the burgeoning population? Why are they not enforcing small family norms by meting out extremely harsh and deterrent punishments, disincentives and penalties to the defaulters, just as in China? Is not the politics of minority (read Muslim) vote bank also, directly or indirectly, responsible for it?

Do extra-ordinary maladies not require extra-ordinary solutions?

-SANJOG MAHESHWARI