Each year, it seems, we relive the tragedies of the previous years. Someone gets washed away in an open drain or homes get flooded or both. There’s always a great deal of noise about what’s wrong with the city’s administration which allows this to happen and what should be done to correct it. But nothing happens and the whole mess is repeated the next year.
How do we break this cycle of indifference? One way would be to identify the technical things that need to be done like building soak-pits in water drains, separating sewage from stormwater, designing drains with more care, making pedestrian infrastructure more attractive and safe, and so on. But there is more to our public problems than this.
The answer to many of the issues, which appear to be endlessly neglected, could lie in people’s participation. Whether it is frothing lakes, dangerous drains, or dangling wires from trees, it can be tackled if we abandon our dependence on the administration and become part of the problem-solving mechanism.
In some departments there aren't enough officials to do everything that needs to be done. We could try to overcome this by hiring more public officials, but that would not be as effective as including the public itself in developing and managing the city. For too long we have thought of citizens as only consumers of democracy, but not producers of it. If we change this perspective, we will have more success in solving the civic issues dogging the city.
If you don't believe this you only have to look at the success stories of community involvement in problem solving. Lakes have been revived and while some communities have become zero garbage generators, others have switched to sustainable electric lights and devices. A few have figured out how to treat waste water and reuse it. There are enough such examples and the common thread running through all of them is the active participation of the locals. In my view in a democracy, the government isn't only for the people and of the people, but should also be by the people.
