Indian political leaders and bureaucrat

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Babus don’t bus to work</b>
The Pioneer Edit Desk
There’s no reason why the people should
Bureaucrats who spend their entire working lives travelling in poorly maintained, petrol-guzzling official cars — till recently the ubiquitous white Ambassador — fitted with flashing, screaming claxons symbolising power and authority at taxpayers’ expense, have the tendency to come up with the most bizarre suggestions to control fuel emission on city roads. Late last year, babus in the Government of Delhi decided that the best way to keep the national capital’s air clean and healthy would be to ban diesel vehicles from its roads. It did not strike them that India should move towards low sulphur diesel as has been done by developed countries with better air quality. Of course, they had to back off from implementing their absurd idea after diesel vehicle manufacturers exposed their ignorance and called their bluff. We are now told that the ‘Mission on Sustainable Habitat’, set up to implement the National Action Plan on Climate Change, has come up with equally preposterous and feather-brained measures to control carbon emission and save our planet from doom and destruction. With missionary zeal, the members of this exalted committee have recommended that the ‘all round cost’ of using ‘personal vehicles’ should be made so steep that people stop using their cars to commute to work and families stay home to watch Doordarshan on holidays. Of course, babus and politicians will be exempt from this severe disincentive as they do not use ‘personal vehicles’, nor will the ‘official vehicles’ that are placed at their disposal be withdrawn. The committee has also proposed that ownership of parking space should be made mandatory before people are allowed to buy cars; a heavy congestion charge should be imposed to stop people from driving into city centres; public parking space should be limited (presumably reserved for ‘official vehicles’) and parking fees linked to the cost of land; and, road space for ‘personal vehicles’ should be reduced.

All this and more adds up to a recipe for unmitigated disaster. More importantly, it betrays a certain mindset which should have gone out of fashion with the end of the pre-liberalisation era when <b>Ministers, babus and businessmen travelled in cars and everybody else either rode a bus or a bicycle to work, and groaned at the thought of taking their families out on Sunday</b>. Obviously, the official green brigade believes that salvation lies in refusing the masses the right to own cars. This is not policy but bureaucratic shortsightedness; the usual official knee-jerk response to a complex problem that results in short-cuts which lead to a blind alley and ultimately leaves a crisis unresolved. It is true that the country faces a huge problem of managing traffic on the roads, especially in urban areas, and reducing fuel emission. But it is equally true that the increasing number of cars on our roads could be contained had there been a viable public transport system. There isn’t, and nobody talks of augmenting public transport facilities or creating additional infrastructure. That would require both expenditure and creative thinking — the Government is reluctant to spend; babus do not have the ability to think out of the box. <b>There is no percentage in berating people for not bussing to work — babus don’t, neither do their political masters</b>. Nor should we expect people to stop using ‘personal vehicles’ — they have the right to do so. What can be done is to create an attractive alternative by way of an expanded, reliable public transport system. Countries that are serious about fuel emission have opted for this alternative. We are clearly not among those countries.
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