STREET FURNITURE - Individual Responsibility

Over lunch, we got to talk about Delhi with Sharat Das, a graduate of SPA (1970), and one of the city’s prominent architects.  Hs firm, Sharat Das and Associates, designed the Indira Gandhi National Stadium, and is now working on the design for the IGNOU campus.  In 1987, he was nominated to the Delhi Urban Arts Commission.  This commission had been enacted in 1975, after Indira Gandhi had become disturbed by the changes in Delhi’s urban environment; it was decidedly not user-friendly, and monsters in the guise of public buildings were rising all around.  The DUAC was given the responsibility for reviewing and clearing the plans of all non-residential buildings proposed in the city, in order to achieve some semblence of order and coherence.

We began discussing street furniture – bus stands, benches, waste cans and all the other paraphernalia normally placed along streets.

Sharat:  In India, public property is abused.  If your car breaks down on the road, you leave it there – no thought of shifting it to the curb – put some bricks and stones around it, and repair it there.  When you’re finished, you drive off, leaving the stones behind on the road.  This attitude seems peculiar to northern India.

The city administration wants clean roads, working lights, benches at bus stops, trees to provide shade.  But after a month, all these are gone.  So where does and administration get the initiative to do these things?  Society must take responsibility for its won benefit, but I see no movement in this regard.  In Bangalore, in Bombay, yes; but not in Delhi.

DA:  so where can we put street furniture?
Sharat :  Well, there are really no footpaths. They’ve all been cut, or encroached upon by electric towers, vendors or pavement dwellers.  So the pedestrian moves down the road.  He has no alternative.

The lawns at India Gate, situated in the most prestigious location in the country, are dying.  Funds have been provided, but wrongly spent.  When it was opened to the public, the amount of litter left everyday was unbelievable:  piles and piles of ice cream wraps.  There are no waste baskets, or if there are, they’re broken or poorly placed.  Most have been stolen.  If there is a functional waste basket, people don’t use it; the waste is thrown close by, but not in it.”

People need to realize that when they do this, they hurt themselves.  When a labour union in this country strikes, what’s the first thing they do?  Burn the public transport. They are burning their own money!  In some tiny way, they need to realize ‘these buses belong to us’.

DA:  Could this be the attitude because so few people pay taxes?
Sharat:  Even tax payers burn buses.  But government is perceived as some foreign body collecting money form different sources to look after our welfare.  We haven’t learned to differentiate between the old rulers and government: That’s for the government to do.

In the United States, in Delaware, I took a train to see what train travel is like there.  In the station, there was an old man shining shoes.  He had a beautiful stand; the brass was shining.  His uniform was crisp, perfect, not an excuse of a uniform.  The traditions were upheld.  I said to my wife, I must get my shoes shined.  But she looked at the price, $3, and thought it was too expensive.  I went ahead, because the experience in such a setting would be worth far more than $3 for me.  I sat down royally and got a wonderful shine.  I gave him a $2 tip; this didn’t really make financial difference to him, but it made a difference to me.  He gave me a salute and a smile as I left.

DA:  So how to inculcate individual responsibility for public property?
Sharat:  The schools must take this on.
DA:  Schooling may be compulsory, but that doesn’t really mean everyone’s getting an education.
Sharat :  It is not the poor so much as the well-off who are the real vandals-the kids from the best schools, whose parents give them a Maruti at age 14.
DA:  Will the growing consumer rights movement do some good in promoting individual responsibility?
Sharat :  I don’t know.  People are scared to lodge complaints against powerful people, for fear that their family might be injured.  This fear psychosis is held by many people.  All we want is to be able to live peacefully.  Even when you do something right, you are punished for it.  Many years ago, before I married, I was living with some friends in Nizamuddin.  It was about 11 at night, when we heard a lot of noise from the market area.  We ran out and saw a huge Sikh holding another Sikh up in the air by the man’s collar.  The big one had a knife and had already cut the other on the arm.  I was too small to take on such a big man, but I couldn’t believe I was going to stand on the edge of this silent crowd and watch a man murdered.  I picked up two fistfuls and sand from a nearby pile, and worked my way through the crowd till I was facing the big Sikh.  He hadn’t noticed anything strange.  I threw the sand in his face, and as he dropped the other man, ran behind him and punched him hard.  He fell, and by then the police had arrived, and  took him to custody.

For eight years, every four months or so, I was called to the courts as a witness.  I would spend all day there.  Finally I asked the judge to take my name off the list of witnesses, and he agreed.

Why should I help this society?  Every country has its own problems, but at least in the West, the common man can survive peacefully without problems from his neighbours or the systems.

Sensitiveness towards one’s neighbourhood and to public property as their own can only be inculcated at a very young age at home as well as at school.  We, most of us parents are fairly indifferent about it.  So the schools could not care less.

It is not possible for all of us to be transformed into selfless saints overnight or become Gandhians.  But at least, let all citizens of this country take a vow on Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday that no one will burn public buses, no one will plant a bomb in a train or any building, no one will damage, steal or encroach upon any public property.  Then, and only then will it be possible for all of us to live in a safer Delhi and better India.

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