We walked… simply walked in the city

In the hurry-burry of our stressed urban lives, enveloped in a wealth of affordable conveniences, our loss on some fronts has been immense.

In many of our towns and cities, people have lost the art of walking and cycling. And along with it, tragically, the immense health benefits associated with these simple yet critical elements of a healthy lifestyle.

People no longer walk or cycle the way they did in the past. What came naturally, effortlessly and happened seamlessly during the routine activities of the day, is now seen as entirely unnecessary. For the health conscious, these are tasks which figure on the “to do” lists and consume time.

An aunt, barely in her 60s, held some of us spellbound when she spoke of her childhood.

The meandering discussion touched on the epidemic proportions of diabetes and hypertension among young Indians today and soon focused on how people walked and cycled in our cities in the not-too-distant past.

Many of our senior citizens are rather healthy and developed diabetes or hypertension only later in life, if at all. Was it the routine walking and cycling that insulated them from these ‘lifestyle’ diseases?

“We simply walked and walked… and thought nothing about it. We would climb the Parvati hill every morning and come running down.  The horse-buggy fare from the railway station to our home (about three-four km away) was just 10 paise. But we didn’t take that and instead walked. We walked all around in the city. Schooling and college happened entirely on the bicycle,” the aunt recalled.

This was the story till about four decades ago when cycling to school was a habit in many cities, particularly in smaller ones like Pune.

Today, those who cycle on our city roads, do so at the risk of their lives, overwhelmed by the heavy traffic, poor urban infrastructure and the complete or partial absence of mass transportation. This loss is a generational loss and therefore fewer and fewer people cycle today. The much greater loss is of an urban population that has lost some healthy habits.

Children can’t cycle in our cities and the elderly can’t walk because the footpaths are non-existent or broken. Crossing the road in heavy traffic is virtually impossible.

Thus, the seniors stay imprisoned in their homes or housing colonies because visiting friends or attending public events has become hazardous. An unforgettable anecdote relates to an elderly woman who, after waiting patiently to cross a Pune road to go to a nearby shop, returned home, pulled out her car and completed the errand.

Following the global trend, India too is getting rapidly urbanised and therefore, the urgency to fix our cities. The Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) launched in 2005 to improve the quality of life and infrastructure in our cities, seems to have lost steam five years down the road. It has got caught in red tape and lethargy.

The Bus Rapid Transport System, inspired by the phenomenal success in reducing personalised transport in Bogota, has been successful, just partly, in Ahmedabad. Elsewhere it is a disaster, marred by poor implementation.

We need to take ownership of our cities and demand change from our leaders and bureaucrats. We need to demand and pursue better urban planning. Not so much to beautify our cities as much as to beautify the lives of our citizens — the young and the old — with healthy lifestyles.