May 2008 Edition
Umesh Anand
I have been one of the thousands of middle class motorists who have found construction of the bus rapid transit (BRT) project in Delhi a bit too much to cope with. Such is the chaos it has brought in its wake at the implementation stage that I have often wondered whether any good at all can come from the project when it is completed. In the absence of signage and traffic police, vehicles have gone helter-skelter. I have often found my self in the wrong lane and wasted precious time getting out of it. I can therefore understand some of the anger against the BRT.
But the fact is that the BRT is an idea gaining currency the world over. By dividing up urban road space so that buses are physically segregated, travel becomes quicker, safer, cheaper and less polluting. People also get the space to cycle and walk, which planners and politicians find improves the quality of life in a city, apart from making it more egalitarian. If Indian cities are to be engines of growth and change, then to begin with they will have to be more inclusive in theirservices. If they don’t move in this direction they will become tinderboxes of inequalities and social tension. Delhi’s problem has been that it does not have an Enrique Penalosa, the iconic Mayor of Bogota, to lead from in front. The BRT project suffers from poor social marketing. In the absence of a political vision, a good project has been left to fend for itself. The problem is one of governance.
The police and the administration, councillors and MLAs, the high profile MPs from Delhi --- - they all needed to be out there making things happen. Penalosa’s message is that the challenge in urban travel is more political than technical. We have to decide who our cities are meant for. If in Delhi 60 per cent of the commuters don’t use cars, then we need to invest in buses, make way for cyclists and redesign our roads accordingly. It is really a nobrainer.
OPINION POLL: When the Congress-led UPA came to power, for the first time we saw a government partnering activists, NGOs and people’s groups. Many of the UPA’s election promises came from them andpolicies and legislation thereafter were drafted on their advice. We thought it would be a good idea to assess what these groups now feel about the UPA’s performance. We asked GfK MODE to undertake this exercise so as to have a representative sample from across the country and reduce subjectivity. Clearly activists have much to be unhappy about. But the fact that the UPA gets pass marks means that this is a support base it can hope to continue to draw upon for framing its policies.
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