Column

Government never thought of consulting residents for Sion flyover

Once upon a time, in a Plutocratic galaxy far, far away, an American tycoon was being hosted by an English magnate at the latter’s club. It was a sort of a club in which bearers can quote from Baudelaire. But the American had turned up in that starchy preserve in jeans and a T. The host decorously complimented the American’s brave informality.

“Nobody here knows I am a trillionaire,” the Yank said pithily. A year later, the Brit aristocrat visited New York and accepted a luncheon invitation from his old friend. When he turned up at the American’s club, where most valets have a PhD in Norman Mailer’s oeuvre, he found his host in shorts and sleeveless T. “Every s.o.b here knows I am trillionaire,” the Yank said, reading his guest’s bemusement. The amorality this story peddles is: If you are rich, you don’t have to care, and when you don’t care, you can fly over all considerations of sensitivity and reason.
The Pedder Road tony-set, which is opposing a flyover in its ecologically pristine refuge, seems to believe in the above syllogism. Sadly, either the government endorses that paternalistic view, or is too pusillanimous to correct it.

If the government had a consistent policy to address genuine concerns, it would not have been stymied so regularly, and so brazenly, by the Pedder Road activists. But successive governments have ploughed into people’s social ecology without any consultation or consideration which seem evident in the handling of the Pedder Road flyover.
The government has assured the combative residents that it will create “thin” flyover that will cut down the intrusiveness of the project.

A great idea politically, but it does occur to me, a novice in matters of road design, that a channel meant for easing congestion will not work very well when it is constricted.

At any rate, did the government make a similar offer to the residents of Sion when it a laid a mesh of roads and flyovers at Sion? If you take a ‘flyover tour’ across Mumbai, you will be able to easily determine the socio-economic profile of hundreds of Mumbaikars. The bridges get so close to homes that you can see the brand-name labels on the TV sets in many sitting rooms!

The new flyovers that are coming up on the Western Express Highway, towards Borivili, swerve so close to many buildings that even a motorcycle horn can sound as shrill as a drill. Then there are gusts of dust and road-rage abuse that will attack windows and sleep throughout the night. Yet not too many affected residents want to stall work: they don’t suggest that folks drive back to Borivili through Thane. That would be a ludicrous thought, an unthinkable thought, in fact.

The amorality of this story: if you are a suburban Mumbaikar and want to go to Colaba, buy a home in Pedder Road for a stopover. If things go on the way they are, that may be the only way to beat the traffic.

raghu@dnaindia.net