Subir Roy: Liberation round the corner

OFF BEAT/ Bangalore will soon abolish parking fees

There is now no holding back Bangalore. It is already a global brand. People who have the foggiest and the most dated notion of India sit up at the mention of the city.

Global leaders steadily treck to the city to find out how they can replicate its formula so that they also can have cities where software engineers come out of the woodwork.

The city has now taken a decision which is likely to splash its name across the world even more, making it not just a land of hope and plenty but a land of the fancy free.

The worthy fathers of the worthy city have decided to do away with that great bugbear of urban affluence, the parking fee. Come April 1, most appropriately, you will not have to pay a parking fee to park your car in Bangalore.

Parking fees, that great block to the flowering of the urban psyche, will be gone!

Imagine the tension that urban society has had to bear in living with the mounting parking fee bill or the nightmare of your car being towed away should you have parked for too long.

All that will go, the psychoanalyst will take an income cut with less stress to attend to as thought leader Bangalore ushers India (surely other cities will follow its example) into the never never land of free parking.

How did the city fathers get this brainwave? When the new mayor took over (the city gets a new one every year), he inherited a legacy of corruption and mismanagement of parking contracts.

The city corporation lost a lot of potential revenue, citizens complained of harassment and poor service from parking attendants and the opposition made splendid capital out of these complaints.

So what better way to remove all the irritation in one go, abolish parking fees altogether "" much like curing a headache by cutting off the head.

As soon as the measure was announced, the short-sighted promptly asked: how will the city admin make up the revenue parking contractors were forking out? But the mayor and his advisers had thought up an astonishingly brilliant way out.

Not only will the Rs 4.5 crore revenue loss be made up, multiples more will be earned! How? By becoming strict about hoardings! There is a rule that not just company nameplates but also all public hoardings should have their messages in Kannada, too.

The city will get strict with this.

So it will not be enough to say in colonial English that "Surf washes whitest" but repeat the same in Kannada. Those who don't will pay a fine and presumably since these hoardings are a great sales inducer, they will raise their hoarding size to be able to accommodate bilingual messages.

And you never know, should designers find it difficult to include bilingual messages in hoardings, companies may even double their hoarding size to have one in English and another in Kannada.

There is a clear chance that soon all hoardings in all decent Indian cities that have an advertising potential will start sporting bilingual hoardings (every region has its regional language), thus multiplying the revenues of those city admins which might just decide to have parking fees and bilingual hoardings too.

The greatest boon will, of course, befall Delhi. Being the national capital it could order that all hoardings should be in all the regional languages.

So instead of single hoardings in English or Hindi, "Surf washes whitest" could be in as many as 16 languages!

When a great new revolutionary idea hits the public, there are always doubters, raising niggling ifs and buts. Some have inevitably asked what will happen to the new multi-storeyed parking lots that the city is building at key points.

And, most important, what will happen to the parking meters put up in a key shopping area Brigade Road and to be replicated in equally shoppy Commerical Street.

The city admin has got into five-year contracts with local shop owners' associations to man and maintain these meters that have done wonders to the turnaround of cars, leading to more footfalls.

One report says the mayor wants also the parking meters out and others quote civic officials implying that a hundred flowers can bloom; you can have free and paid parking in different areas.

This is not all. Creative Bangalore has generated even more outstanding ideas. Parking fees may go but who will look after parking spaces and parked cars, so that they are not broken into.

It is again the advertisers who will be expected to come to the rescue. One suggestion offered was that they will maintain parking spaces for advertising rights.

Expectedly, some have sought to pick a hole even in this brilliant idea by asking, what if the advertisers put up hoardings that make it difficult for people to walk down pavements. They seem to have forgotten that in that happy land of free parking you will park where you like and not have to walk at all.

In the couple of days since the mayor has unleashed his dramatic idea and the city council promptly endorsed it, there has been no clear comment in the city papers that the city fathers are collectively insane.

You cannot have a modern city without elaborate pay and park arrangements. With the disincentive of parking fees gone, in the short run there will be greater use of cars and two-wheelers leading to more traffic jams and chaos.

In the longer run, this will up auto pollution and make the city unlivable. It is not for nothing that Bangalore's putative first citizen, N R Narayana Murthy, has asked for new rules so that mayors do not come and go every year and the city is run by policies that look beyond day after tomorrow.

sub@business-standard.com