by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group
The NDA government was elected to
office last year sailing on a slogan as promising as sab ka saath, sab ka
vikas. The embarrassing fact is that, despite Prime Minister Narendra Modi's
jet-setting foreign schedules and his skill at selling dreams (or may be
schemes), like bullet trains, the economy has not shown signs of recovery as
yet. Ironically, most of Modi's ministers are proving unexpectedly inept,
incompetent and arrogant. A group of motor-mouth ministers is enough to do the rest.The Congress under the Gandhi family is anything but a responsible Opposition.
The National Herald case, which indeed carries the first whiff of a corruption
scandal against the family, is being resisted by the party with an
unprecedented rancour, as if it is blasphemy.
While people are coming to terms
with putting it down to fate, the biggest surprise came last week from the most
unexpected quarters. While Delhi's politicians were fighting their selfish
battles, the city became inhabitable due to two reasons: its poor air quality,
and congestion of its roads due to unchecked growth of vehicular population.
Delhi's air is declared by the WHO as the worst in the world, with denser
concentration of tiny particles than Beijing, the worst offender till recently.
The tiny particulate matters invade the alveoli of the lungs, which are the
tiny pulmonary chambers in which blood receives oxygen from the air we breathe.
Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal jolted the conscience of the city when he
tweeted a picture released by eminent heart surgeon Naresh Trehan showing the
ominously sooty profiles of lungs of two residents of the city, one of them a
child and the other a 55-year-old. Tragically, they were equally rotten.
But tiny particles have rustic
origin, like burning of post-harvest plants. Automobiles, on the other hand,
are killer emitters of carbon dioxide, the main culprit for global warming,
apart from poisonous carbon monoxide and the nitrous oxides that diesel engines
emit. Delhi has India's largest vehicular population, about 7.6 million (2012)
including 2.2 million passenger cars (the rest are mostly two-wheelers). These
numbers are in excess of the combined number of vehicles in Chennai, Bengaluru
and Mumbai, the next three cities with high vehicular population. Though Delhi
has the largest road length (30,000 kilometres), every square inch of its
surface is occupied by standing cars during office hours on the working days.
In fact driving in Delhi is a serious menace to health. Bumper-to-bumper traffic
movement is multiplying drivers' cardiac problems. Besides, usually driving on
the lower gears, the city's cars, most of which have diesel engines, emit more
noxious gases than a couple of super thermal power plants.
Kejriwal, as a politician, is considered
light-weight, who has a powerful electoral base in Delhi, and increasingly in
Punjab, but leaders of the big parties are usually envious and contemptuous of
him. He sprang a surprise on them with the announcement of a dramatic plan to
ration road space by allowing cars with odd and even numbers as last digits on
their licence plates on alternate days. To be launched from the first day of
2016, the plan will serve as a pilot project for 15 days. Thereafter, learning
lessons from the experience, the road rationing plan may be fine-tuned to give
it a permanent shape.
The idea is neither novel nor
fool-proof. In Paris, where it began, it had to be abandoned for a combination
of reasons, one of them being the readiness of Parisians to flaunt a second car
when the first car's number does not match the date. Delhiites too have the
same spirit and the Kejriwal formula may finally end up enriching automobile
makers' pocket, without seriously denting the crowding of cars on roads. In
fact it may cause traffic to grow. Besides, sifting from the flow of cars the
CNG cars, and those in the exempted categories (carrying patients, or being
driven by women alone), may invite a 'police raj' on streets on an
unprecedented scale. It could have been a better idea, perhaps, to follow the
London model in Delhi. In London, a standard congestion charge of 11.5 pounds
is levied on each car entering central London between 7 am and 8 pm.
About 54 per cent of Londoner
households have at least one car (in Delhi it is very much less), but
congestion charge is one reason why they leave car at home, often for the
homemaker wife to do shopping at the nearby Tesco. There are still many who
cannot but take the car into the inner city. Their money, about two billion
pounds (` 20,000 crore) a year, has given London a world class public transport
system - an underground-overground metro which makes news when it fails or
falters, and a bus service so punctual that passengers at bus stops set their
watch by their arrival timings.
The Kejriwal formula falls short as
it fails to show a way of generating revenue to expand Delhi's public
transportation infrastructure. With a length of only 185 kil a The Kejriwal
formula may end up enriching automobile makers' pocket, without seriously
denting the crowding of cars on roads. Besides, sifting from the flow of cars
the CNG cars, and those in the exempted categories may invite a 'police raj' on
streets. on an unprecedented scale. It could have been a better idea, perhaps,
to follow the London model in Delhi. In London, a standard congestion charge of
11.5 pounds is levied on each car entering central London between 7 am and 8
pm.
About 54 per cent of Londoner
households have at least one car (in Delhi it is very much less), but
congestion charge is one reason why they leave car at home, often for the
homemaker wife to do shopping at the nearby Tesco. There are still many who
cannot but take the car into the inner city. Their money, about two billion
pounds (Rs 20,000 crore) a year, has given London a world class public
transport system—an underground-overground metro which makes news when it fails
or falters, and a bus service so punctual that passengers at bus stops set
their watch by their arrival timings.
The Kejriwal formula falls short as
it fails to show a way of generating revenue to expand Delhi’s public
transportation infrastructure. With a length of only 185 kilometeres, the Delhi
metro is woefully short of giving citizens a substantially enhanced mobility.
It costs a king’s ransom to add a single kilometre to it. The 6000 new buses to
be added to DTC fleet each one costing Rs 85 lakh along with 20000
auto-rickshaws and 10000 taxis will surely add to more chaos.
But what could Kejriwal do under the
circumstances? If he were to generate revenue for public transportation, there
could be opposition from powerful quarters. A new restriction on diesel cars
may be enforced by Supreme Court but it is too big an issue. However, Kejriwal,
despite his limitations, has taken a gigantic step. He dares to take risk and
knows the pulse of the people. His steps are hailed by the poor and the rich
find it difficult to criticize either. He knows how to hog the limelight and
steal the thunder in the midst of big battle being fought between the BJP and
the Congress.
