For the people

As some readers may know, because I have written about it here before, I cycle around. When I go to work it is usually or often on the bike. It is cheap, healthy and above all it does not contribute to climate change. I sold the car that I have (though my wife has hers) and do not think I will ever get another, and certainly not another that has an internal combustion engine. If India allows easy import of Tesla’s electric vehicles, I might consider getting one of those, though heaven knows how it will fare on our roads.

I try and take public transport wherever it is available. In India, this is less often than it is when I am abroad. The world’s cities seem to be made for public transport. The Metro is how the wealthy and the working class travel in London and in Tokyo and in New York. Japan’s bus services and London’s are so good that they are a joy to use. Many cities now have bike lanes, for the exclusive use of cyclists.

Public transport across the world is inexpensive, or less expensive than cars, and certainly it is faster. There are not many cities I have been in which have poor public transport, though Los Angeles was one. When we turn to India, the story changes. We have no real appetite for making our cities better and easier to negotiate for the majority of the public, meaning those who do not own cars. 

There are no proper footpaths, to begin with. My house is in a middle-class neighbourhood and on exiting it and coming to the main road, there is no real place to walk for the pedestrian except to drift in and out of the traffic. There is a space for the footpath but it is uneven, elevated and quite dangerous. This is not exceptional by any means and there is no part of India that has uniformly good walking spaces. Many new and shiny parts of our country do not have footpaths at all, such as Gurgaon.

The sound of honking, which is ubiquitous in India, and the filth that we have on our roads and generally in our cities, makes walking doubly or triply unpleasant. And so, we have managed to eliminate it more or less as a form of transport, except for those who absolutely must walk because they have no means, like the daily wage labourers we still see in 2019.

We have no real appetite for making our cities better and easier to negotiate for the majority of the public

Cycling is possible but not ideal because of its dangers. I have a friend who was rear-ended by a vehicle and has lost half of his brain because of the violence of the accident. On a cycling group that I am a part of, a message was circulated this week of an executive who died after being hit by a truck from the back. Of course, I am referring to the middle class because they are the ones who are covered. The thousands of lives lost by the poor mean very little to us in terms of reportage and changes in policy or law.

I was reminded of this, again, when I drove (in the wife’s car) to the airport at Bangalore a few days ago. The road leading up to the terminal that loops off from the highway to Hyderabad, led straight to the terminal till a few days ago. I know that road well because it was a regular cycling route on weekends for a group of us. We can no longer use it because the road has been narrowed to a two-laner with fast-moving cars, mostly taxis, taking people to the airport. 

This road has now been detoured and one must go around quite a bit and then circle back to reach the terminal. The reason is that the terminal is, again, being expanded. Bangalore had an airport in the middle of the city which was in use till about a decade ago. Then a new airport was built at Devanahalli because the old one couldn’t handle the traffic. Now the new one is being extended again, and it looks like a very large project, to accommodate flyers in the future. 

In January it was announced that the Namma Metro line would be extended to the airport, and this would cost the state more than Rs 10,000 crore. It is a line that will only deliver flyers. The reason I am writing this is to compare it to what has been happening around the country for transportation when it comes to the poor and the working class. 

Over a decade ago, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh shut down their state bus transport corporations. This did not receive the sort of coverage that would have come if Bangalore had shut down its airport. I have a former colleague whose father lost his job as a driver in one of those state bus operations. What do such things mean to those who use them?

In 2016, Harsh Mander reported the story of two young men, an investment banker and an MIT graduate, who decided to live on Rs 100 a day. Mander wrote: "Many things changed for them. They spent a large part of their day planning and organising their food. Eating out was out of the question; even dhabas were too expensive. Milk and yoghurt were expensive and therefore used sparingly; meat was out of bounds, as was processed food, like bread. No ghee or butter, only a little refined oil. Both are passionate cooks with healthy appetites. They found soy nuggets a wonder food — affordable and high on proteins, and worked with many recipes. Parle G biscuits again were cheap: twenty-five paise for twenty-seven calories! They innovated a dessert of fried banana on biscuits. It was their treat each day.”

Then there was this line: “Living on Rs 100 made the circle of their life much smaller. They found that they could not afford to travel more than five kilometres in a day, by bus. If they needed to go further, they could only walk.”

Here is the crux of the matter. Cheap, safe and easy transport increases opportunity, especially for the poorest. Our disregard of footpaths and buses and our splurging on airports says something brutal about our society and how the privileged minority appropriate the rights of the poorest without even giving it thought.