Stop blaming pedestrians for getting killed & instead sensitise motorists!

In the last week, I read two contradictory news items from Delhi and Ahmedabad. The Delhi Traffic Police took out a drive for unruly motorists to respect pedestrians by giving them enough space on zebra crossing. Motorists who stopped before zebra crossings were given chocolates and key chains and the ones who did not were fined. The reason for this drive was the data of road fatalities – almost 46% of the people who died in road crashes in Delhi were pedestrians. Pedestrians do not have proper footpaths to walk on or safe crossings to go across the roads. It is commendable that the Delhi traffic police took the road fatalities data seriously and ran a campaign of supporting pedestrian rights. 

The other news items came from our own Ahmedabad (DNA, 29/06/15) where pedestrians were termed as ‘rash pedestrians’ by the Traffic Police and blamed for their own death or injuries in road crashes. The pedestrians were asked to use zebra crossings and footpaths to be safe. Great! It would have been utmost helpful, if the Traffic Police took some efforts of showing the said zebra crossings and footpaths by walking for about 200 meters on any city road! Where are the footpaths and zebra crossings in Ahmedabad? Footpaths are mostly covered by parked vehicles, roadside businesses and other things. There is no space left on the zebra crossings for the pedestrians to cross. The zebra crossings start and end in blank walls, planters and hoardings. With such sorry state of pedestrian infrastructure in the city, they are still blamed as ‘causes’ of accidents. 

How can the pedestrians alone be the ‘causes’ of these accidents? When there is a collision can you only blame one side? I can only picture these ‘rash’ pedestrians as being zombies who are crashing themselves into the fast-moving vehicles and committing suicide. Calling pedestrians as the sole reason for accidents amounts to blaming the victims. Pedestrians are victims and not perpetrators of traffic crimes because they are at higher risks and are more vulnerable during road crashes. Victim blaming has its own logical fallacies and besides, it is convenient to blame someone – it distracts the attention from the real problems. If you blame the victims like the pedestrians then no one will ask questions about systemic problems like why there is no safe infrastructure for pedestrians in the city? OR why the Traffic Police is only concerned about protecting the vehicular traffic and why do they ignore the pedestrian or the non-motorised traffic? 

Traffic Police in Ahmedabad and in other cities are doing commendable job of managing the unmanageable – the never-ending traffic. They have scarce resources, inadequate staff, limited equipments and a thankless job. But an important part of their job is to reduce road fatalities and injuries. Blaming the victims does not help their job at all. Rather they should proactively work with different road users to make them safe on our hostile roads. 

About one-third of the total intra-city journeys in our cities are by walking. We all have to walk sometime or the other. Unsafe pedestrian environment affects everyone in the family. When pedestrians are using the roads, they are scavenging for safe spaces to walk on. They operate with a different logic compared to the motorised traffic. Beyond the usual contest over road space, it is essential that both the pedestrians and the motorists understand each other’s way of dealing with the road space and have mutual respect. Cities, which are built on mutual respect and shared spaces, are the most beautiful cities in the world. 

 (6th July, 2015: DNA Ahmedabad edition, Cities Supplement, Page 5)

At crossroads – deliberative democracy and accountable governance

Few days back in a workshop, a government official (should I dare say servant) remarked that, "too much of democracy is the root of all problems". The context was some communities living in informal settlements refusing to give their 'data' to the officials who had decided to implement 24x7 water supply. These communities were never consulted while planning this scheme and they saw it as a ploy to extract more money from them in the name of services charges for the new scheme. Even the political wing (technically the people’s representative) were also not fully on board. But the officials expected the community to abide by their order (co-operate) and facilitate the implementation of the scheme. This is a classic case of the mutual mis-trust and breakdown in communication stalling the project. A lot could be inferred from this episode but let’s keep our focus on this remark.

Incidentally, it is the 40th anniversary of the declaration of emergency in India when all civil liberties were curtailed for two years, between 1975-77. The years under emergency reflected the attitude that ‘democracy doesn't work, we know what is best for the people and we need free hand to implement those good things’.  While it might seem unfair to connect casual remarks about the imperfections of democracy with the coercive act of subverting democracy at the national level, but both attitudes are born out of the same germs. People who do not like democratic processes are the ones who want to enjoy power without any accountability and govern on whims and fancies. Yes, democratic processes are messy and they take time but they are the fairest ways of dealing with public resources and discourses. More democracy is often answer to complicated public life problems rather less democracy. More democracy means developing projects and their budgets with people and making them part of the decision-making process – especially for the local issues which affect their life directly.

Good governance requires both the preparedness for the last minute and long-term planning for mitigation and adaptation. For example, water-logging and cave-ins in monsoon, heat stress in summer and Swine Flu in winter – how are these events dealt with? Many government officials will admit privately that they have a little time for long-term planning and new ideas. They are either in celebratory mode by managing events or they are chasing the last minute preparedness. And after achieving short-term goals, they come into self-congratulatory mode quickly. There is hardly any long-term planning directed towards mitigation or adaptation. Perpetual adhocism and last minute decisions work best with ‘command and control’ kind of attitudes and democratic processes seems as hindrances. 

In such situation, the only possible relationship between the people and the official is that of a petitioner and a lord. The officials have lost their ability to engage with the citizens on any issue. And the citizens have also lost patience in being part of any deliberative process set up by the government. Yes, we are often not too kind in our criticism of the government. And they are not too kind in dealing with rising expectations. Do we have a fix to this mutually developed fissure in the relationship? Yes, but the fix is not a quick one - more accountability, more deliberations, more engagement on both sides, probably. 

(29th June, 2015: DNA Ahmedabad edition, Cities Supplement, Page 5)

Charles Correa and blessings of the sky – architecture for modern India

Architect Charles Correa

Kanchanjangha apartments, Mumbai

Gandhi Memorial Museum, Ahmedabad

Charles Correa, the legendary architect of modern India died last Tuesday. I remember sitting awestruck in Charles Correa's lecture at School of Architecture CEPT in 1998. Before Charles Correa started his lecture, someone was adjusting the microphone in front of him and the mic went too close. Correa immediately said, "Oh, here goes my front teeth." Everyone laughed and I told myself, 'I like this guy!' The lecture was famously called ‘blessings of the sky’ where Correa talked about his creative journey, building after building, to explain how he uses open-to-sky spaces such as courtyards and terraces in his designs. To him, open-to-sky spaces not only have sacred meaning but they are practical way of making climate-friendly buildings which people can associate with very easily. 

Charles Correa is a leading name among a generation of architects who began their career when India became independent. And the question in front of him was how to design buildings, which have Indian ethos and Western modernity at the same time. Correa drew references from the historical buildings and traditional vernacular architecture without being burdened by the past. He absorbed Western modernist ideas of abstraction compositions and devised them to cater to the Indian imagination. His architecture was loaded with playful arrangements of colorful planes, light and shadows. 

Ahmedabad knows Charles Correa as a designer of the Memorial Museum at the Sabarmati Ashram. He was 28 years old when he was commissioned this work. Charles Correa taught us how to design in a powerful historical context like the Gandhi Ashram without being loud or without pretending to be traditional. Correa’s architectural marvel in Gandhi Ashram reflect the beauty of being subtle and of being structured yet flexible. The museum becomes an obvious extension – not only to the other buildings in the Ashram – but also to Gandhi’s philosophy of austerity, simplicity and truthfulness. 

Charles Correa was a tireless advocate of better urban living. His ideas of urban architecture and housing radically deviated from attitudes of greedy floor space consumptions and dreary skylines that define our cities these days. He was a planner for the New Bombay’s early plans until 1975. Later he was asked by Government of India to lead the first ever Commission on Urbanisation between 1985-88. A lot of what is written in the commission's report(s) still makes sense – giving more financial autonomy to cities or to create unified transport authorities and so on. Of course, these recommendations were never taken seriously or acted upon by the government who commissioned it. It is heartening to see that the NIUA (National Institute of Urban Affairs) is determined to re-publish the reports. Today we can surely criticize the positions of the commission but there is no doubt that they had comprehensive road map for the future of cities and this was in many ways a stepping stone for the future urban policies in India.

Charles Correa’s architecture and his ideas on Indian cities became ‘textbooks’ for the architecture and urban planning students. I am sure Charles Correa’s work will come to rescue whenever a teacher looking for an example to show to her students, - ‘Ah, see what Correa did in this kind of situation’. 

 (22nd June, 2015: DNA Ahmedabad edition, Cities Supplement, Page 5)