V.V.S.Raveendra

Thinking about the poverty and poor infrastructure in our country I felt many a time that population, politicians and money are the prime barriers to achieve progress. We don’t have ample number of telephone lines and we get ‘lines are busy, please try again’ message often. We don’t have wide roads to travel at good speed. If we don’t have good roads, our vehicles give less mileage and we import more petrol. We exhaust our foreign exchange reserves more thereby. Singapore has much more population density than ours and much less natural resources than ours. Still it could achieve the ‘developed country’ status.

Of late, I started considering if we could achieve better life with our existing infrastructure and resources. After some time, I found that it is the cultural barrier that we need to overcome to solve many of our problems. I will list out a few instances / cases by which we could make much difference in the positive direction.

If our public meetings (political, social or religious) can take place with speakers necessary for the crowd, instead of cone mikes, we would reduce our noise pollution much better. Imagine our people driving on the roads with some sense, we will have lesser number of accidents and lose our patience fewer times a day. Of late, we find not only car drivers speaking over cell phone, but also bike riders. Our municipal workers repair the drainage and leave the manholes uncovered! To close the manholes we need cultural change, and it does not need any finance.

Soon after the roads are laid, people from telecom, water supply, sewage department etc. dig holes. After their work is over, they don’t care to cover the ditches evenly. They leave bumps on the roads, and often speed breakers as well. Our people need to show little more change in attitude to avoid those bumps and unplanned speed breakers. It does not need any more money or infrastructure.

We paste the wall-posters of all kinds (from movie posters to InfoTech posters) every where. Our people give little consideration for the owners of the houses. Sometimes we paste the posters on traffic signboards as well. Often, we also make use of our state transport buses to display a variety of posters and do not even hesitate to break the window glasses in the event of a bandh / strike.

Occasionally our political parties and societies, in order to show their strength or to protest, take processions in the middle of the city. They care the least to the people who get stuck in the traffic diversions and jams. The amount of time and energy of people wasted because of such traffic jams caused by political rallies are hardly understood.

As Indians, we are religious and sentimental. We conduct Radha Yatras and Ganesh Nimajjanam processions. We also leave the cows for a free ride on the roads. We break coconuts, lemons, pumpkins and water melons to ward off evils and throw them on the streets. When it comes to these matters, we don’t worry about cleanliness and traffic.

Instead of mourning the death of a person by carrying a corpse in silence to the crematorium, our people take a big procession with all kinds of trumpeting and dances, sprinkling rose petals all along the way. It not only causes traffic problems, but also adds to the dirt on the roads. I doubt if the troubled commuters on the roads would ever pray for the departed soul to rest in peace.

Our roads have limited width. If they are dwelling places of the poor and offices for vendors of coconuts, flowers, fruits etc., we can understand that it is due to poverty. But we also construct temples and churches on the pavements. We wait for city buses on the roads instead of queuing up in the bus shelters. We park our two wheelers and four wheelers on the roads irregularly. All these make our life even more tiring.

The number of petrol bunks in any town/city supplying pure petrol can be counted on fingers. The adulterated petrol spoils the engines, stands out as the cause for clouds of smoke coming out of exhaust pipes of many a vehicle. The prime cause of this is dishonesty.

The same applies to Auto drivers. Rarely you find drivers willing to come for meter fare. Even if you hire an auto on meter fare, from railway station to house, you see different autos showing different readings each time! Meter tampering is the bread and butter of our auto wallahs. You come out of Madras international airport and take an auto to your house. I am not sure if you and your luggage would reach safely.

If you think, only our auto wallahs cheat, you are mistaken. In Uttar Pradesh, in 1999, electricity board discovered in the colony of IAS officers that many of them bypassed the meters and were using electricity without paying any bills for years. Every house in the colony had Air Conditioners, Washing machines, Refrigerators and so on!

Once I was standing in the queue for immigration check in Madras airport. Suddenly I noticed a few people coming with an officer and getting the immigration check done, bypassing the queue! Even the people going abroad whom we expect to behave better, cannot stand in the queue for a couple of minutes!

The other day I was withdrawing money from Canara bank. Since I was taking big amount, I requested the lady in the counter to give 100 rupee bundles. She stared at me and gave 50 rupee bundles. I was quite disappointed, because of her "no politeness and no care for the customer" policy. Having stood there for a while, later I thought that she must not have had 100 rupee bundles. She could have told the same to me in a few seconds with smile and done better customer service. It needs a cultural change for our banks and businesses to deal with customers politely.

All these: careless driving on the roads, dishonesty, caring least for the neighborhood of our society, ignoring the rules etc. is part and parcel of our culture. At some time or the other every one of us resorted to bribing to get things done in the government offices, or driven carelessly in traffic, or dumped garbage on the roads or spoke impolitely to our customers. There is no need to think that some of us are pure and pious. Without all these, life in our country would be much better. Most of our problems and barriers are cultural and have the least to do with money. For example, tomorrow we might lay excellent roads, but, as long as we drive as we like, we cannot improve our life.

Just because, we have such a cultural barrier, there is no need for pessimism. India is changing. We lagged Industrial revolution by 200 years. Electronics revolution we lagged by about 30 years. InfoTech / PC revolution by a decade plus. But at the time of e-business or e-commerce, we are in time. Today every company in India wants to do e-commerce. Indians should be proud of it. A number of people are launching e-com sites and portals. Finance companies and banks are funding such entrepreneurs.

For example, a small vegetable shop at Adyar signal in Chennai, called "Vanga Vanga" has its web site and door delivers the ordered items. You can visit this shop at www.vangavanga.com, and it is the first on-line super market of southern India! (This site was dead by July 2000! It did not live for more than a year.)

You can see information on recent movies at their respective websites, www.kandukondain.com for example. You can also book movie tickets at www.clicktickets.com.

Now in Madras, Dishnet came up with the idea of chain browsing centers. Each browsing center has about 40 to 50 PCs. It looks like a computer center. I doubt if some of our good colleges/institutions have such an elegant computer center. If you browse for one hour, it costs only 30 rupees. They are open 6AM to 12 Midnight. The access speed is quite high. In fact browsing in the offices is much slower since the facilities have not grown in proportion to demand.

Whether it is 10^th standard exam results in Andhra Pradesh or 12^th standard results in Tamil Nadu they are published on the Net.

Apart from all that, garbage collection in Chennai is outsourced to a Singapore based company. They are slowly spreading in Chennai. It began a couple of months ago. It might improve our cleanliness, provided our public cooperates.

There are many things that we can achieve with the existing infrastructure and resources. Let all of us do our best to make India a better place in the world.

March 2000