Padma Prakash: Return to normalcy

MOOT POINT

Mumbai's local railway network transports an estimated 4,000 people per train. At peak hours, there is a train every nine seconds on the Western Railways alone. It is the most complex railway system in the world. Over the day, with over 2,000 services it handles 6.1 million passengers. That's as much as the population of some countries. How on earth are we going to ensure the safety and security of this system from recurring attacks of the kind that happened this Tuesday?

Take, for instance, the passenger end of the issue. With no barriers to entry into the platforms, there is no way that passengers or their belongings can be checked. The fact that Mumbai has a Ticketless Travellers' Association should be an indicator of how unequal the system is for checking tickets, leave alone conducting searches. So should the passengers themselves then be encouraged to take on the job of spotting possible dangers? Public service messages caution passengers to be wary of and report about unattended packages. Now, if you are jostling for a place in an overcrowded train, how likely are you to spot an unclaimed package left on the seats, underneath them or on the overhead racks? Soon after the earlier bomb explosions in buses, regular passengers used to conduct a search for "suspicious-looking" parcels. Soon however, it was hard to define what a "suspicious" object was. Often, young people leave their backpacks, umbrellas, tiffin boxes or the ubiquitous plastic carrier bags on the racks inside while they either hang out of the train or gather in the doorways. It's impossible to track every owner of every object on the rack.

Over the decade, Mumbai's work culture and habits have undergone considerable change. There was a time not so long ago when you got into a particular compartment in a particular train at a fixed time and found your set of commuter friends. Today workplaces are better dispersed with suburbs and outliers like Bandra, Santacruz, Andheri, Thane and Mulund housing many corporate offices and service industries. Also, informalisation has affected all occupations, making for blue collar workers and professionals, who work on daily fees/consultations and don't travel to offices every day. The office commute is no longer the 8:54 all the way to Churchgate and the 6:23 back home. The journeys have broken up and so has the commuter camaraderie of earlier years. Because so many of the commuters are new faces, it has become relatively difficult now to notice or bother about odd passengers or their extraordinary behaviour.

In this week's horrific tragedy how could anyone in that packed compartment have spotted an odd tiffin carrier lying on the overhead rack? There have been reports of passengers who have been termed "suspicious" because they happened to get off in a hurry only a couple of stops after they got in. There is another report of someone "dressed like a policeman" who is now being termed "wanted"! What perceptions are we accessing when such information is being bandied about? The definition of the "other" is crystallising in an environment of fear and suspicion. This cannot be a good thing.

While much is being made of Mumbai's ability to "bounce back", what choice did city's working millions have but get to work the following day? Livelihoods in this city, as in other metros, are not only dependent on offices and monthly pay packets, but also on daily incomes. You miss a day; you forego the day's pay. Or equally important, you miss a day's casual leave. And this is true of a wide range of occupations. This complacency about the city's ability to return to an apparent "normalcy" is misplaced. It is absurd to think that anyone who has been affected in any way with the death and disaster of Tuesday can act and react "normally" the day after. We cannot afford to forget that this has been a stunning blow to people, institutions and offices, and administrative systems and to cope with its aftermath requires superhuman efforts.

Curiously""although this may not be the uppermost thought in people's minds now""urban studies have focused on city planning, urban financing, and urban history to some extent. There are sporadic explorations of resettlement projects, urban safety, etc. The fact that a city's development affects and is affected by human behaviour and mores has not received enough attention. At critical times like these, we need to know what city communities are doing, how they live and what they think. Being able to predict social behaviour and movement is essential to planning and securing urban space. Some excellent efforts in these directions are coming from civil society organisations rather than academic/teaching institutions. This means that the integration of urban studies into academic curricula does not happen easily.

Fear subsides with time, but suspicions remain. Although Mumbai may have extended a helping hand across social divides in days of crisis, it would be naïve to think that the blasts do not impact on people's behaviour. They do, and unless something is done to prevent that slide into insularity, it will contribute to the imperceptible ghettoisation that is taking place in the city. Identities, other than that of "fellow passenger", "colleague", "neighbour" have already begun to make an impact in the aftermath of 1993. Civil society groups, with the help of the police and the mohalla committees, have, in most localities, played a major role in promoting good neighbourliness. Mumbai will not bounce back unless active efforts are made to help communities and individuals to overcome these emerging problems.