Column

The city’s No Horn Day was a blaring success for the Mumbai traffic police. During their diligent decibel-muffling drive, the cops apparently penalised more than 6,000 profligate honkers.

The Indian will, when it manages to shake off its enamel of apathy and venality, can power extraordinary actions. Atul Gawande, a US-based surgeon who is considered to be the best doctor-writer in the world today, describes one such instance in “Better”, an engrossing book about medical ‘performance’.

In a chapter about a polio outbreak in Karnataka, Gawande outlines the scope of a “mop-up” operation. He writes: “The Indian government would have to recruit and organise teams of medical workers and volunteers…They would have to be trained in how to administer the vaccine, and be provided with transportation, vaccine, and insulated coolers and ice packs to keep the vaccine cold. And they would have to fan out and vaccinate every child under five years of age. Anything less than 90 per cent coverage of the target population would be considered a failure.”

In the end, four million of the targeted 4.2 million children were vaccinated in the mop-up: that is about 95% coverage!

That is what the babus can do. So don’t be a whiner the next time you are worn down by that 60-slide PowerPoint and abuse the municipality for the bumpy ride that prevented you from working throughout the night. That said, we must also acknowledge that our government’s drives of diligence are at best slapdash.

We first had the heady successes of the campaign against drunken drinking, and now we hear the police top brass saying that horny behaviour on the roads will invite a swift crackdown.

Although the resolve of the cops is welcome, we must ask when they will be able to bring all their activist strands together.

A random drive through Mumbai will confirm that folks who zip around on two-wheelers are wholly indifferent to the sensible advice about wearing helmets. Will it take a high-profile death to convince people to strap on that life-saver? Or will the government have step in, enact a law, and then organise another gusto-steeped exercise to persuade people to protect themselves?

This is where, I think, civic volunteerism is necessary, and of which our great city is sadly bereft. For every 10 motorists who hurtle down the road because there are no stop signs, there are only one or two who will stop to allow schoolchildren to cross over. I know because I counted once, at a site near my home.

That motorists could be so callous in residential zones shocked me into being more careful. Anyway, people who stop let children pass reflexively demonstrate small acts of civility and good sense that come together in the culture of many cultivated societies.

If ‘soft laws’ of customs don’t corral Mumbai motorists into a form of behaviour that is safe for them as well as for those around them, then hard laws should be implemented consistently.

Those who see my preceding comments as another abject admission of Western superiority should go to Singapore, where hard and soft laws work in exquisite concert. As for Mumbai, the implementation of hard laws must be proactive, rather than reactive. But most important, there should be no half measures.

We are clearly not ready for volunteerism yet: We all have that 60-slide presentation to make. So let the law come down heavily on us and govern our driving, our garbage disposal habits, our tendency to waste water, our inability board or disembark from trains without punching and pushing…Mumbai needs a crackdown.
—raghu@dnaindia.net