OOn 1st January 2019 afternoon, when I was calling a few friends to wish them, I got a call from a T.V. channel. T hey wanted a live bite and my opinion on the 'revival' of the steel flyover. I remember blinking in a déjà vu-induced disbelief, thinking that I was either caught in a time warp prank from two years ago or that the person on the other end had forgotten that we were now in 2019. But apparently, the Home Minister had made an informal statement about the return of the flyover, in an unrelated press briefing.
My first reaction? I laughed out loud. I remember saying to the caller: As a government you have to be extremely masochistic, after the complete rejection the citizens gave the previous one -while the whole nation watched - to want to actually take the Steel Flyover Project on again. The wrath of the citizens, the outrage of a genuinely exploited urban mass, and the sheer idiocy of the project, was clearly established on multiple platforms. Secondly, the NGT had already nixed the project and nobody in their right minds would want to take on a project which has already been vetoed on environmental clearances, on project detailing and by poor people impact.
So why again? Why the obstinacy? Good question. Perhaps, a rocky coalition government sending out a message to contractors that they are still in business, be it before and after the upcoming elections. The money mills will continue to grind. However cynical I sound, yes, it's likely to be this.
Timing? Again election time - catch people by surprise, get them stressed, worked up and hyperventilating about how they are being put through something like this again. It's sleight of hand. It's the classic conjuring trick . We are being asked to look somewhere, and the real action is somewhere else. I think we all know what the real action is -the Rs 30000 crore elevated corridor. We do this with our pets when we play fetch - we distract them by throwing the ball or giving them a treat, while quickly adding liver tonic to their dinner. I don't think we want to be the pets in this engagement. And it isn't liver tonic that is good for our digestion that is being quietly added! .
As a cofounder of the Steel Flyover Beda movement and Citizens for Bangalore (now CfB), I have been asked this question a lot, sometimes anxiously and sometimes like a challenge.... ' so what are you doing about the revival of the steel flyover?' . I shrug and I say, like Alfred E Neumann, "what, me worry?' I also feel it is an insult to our collective citizenry's intelligence that this could be bandied about with such seriousness, take so many column centimeters and citizen focus and with so little purpose. Whether it is likely to go further is moot.
However, one thing I can certainly say, that this time if the government would take on the citizens on a matter of our city, its survival, their health, the future of the children and that of the city we love, I can confidently assure you that there would be 100 people like me standing in front of that bulldozer, if it ever came to that. They would be 1000 people straddling across all the trees that have been selected for 'transplants', if it ever came to that. Have you seen the Jayamahal Main road where 800 trees were to be cut? They still stand tall. Can you understand what can be done if one wants to do it? Instead of chopping our (yes, they are OURs) trees, they just made a median with the trees in the middle. Solutions look at us in the face. Yes some of them maybe Band-Aids given the larger issue, but necessarily are more environmental as well as development friendly. Take them. So we do use the Band-Aids. That's what happens when the city is so poorly planned.
Suburban rail, buses, multimodal transport would have solved many of the problems had they been worked on 15 years ago. Why did citizens have to agitate for this, while the powers-that-be shed crocodile tears about traffic congestion and the ho-hum time to the airport? So just because they did not do it, should we 'dig' the violent shortcuts now, or do we still go ahead in parallel with the long term, solid transformational measures that are required to truly address the transport problems of the city? I think this qualifies as a rhetorical question We need to do the hard yards now. This is what happens when the city chooses to take reactive, frequent shortcuts to solve immediate problems like reaching the airport, while hundreds of thousands worry about the air they breathe. The sale of air purifiers has doubled in the city. We want to promote business but suddenly this is not what we want at the price of our health . It's very clear citizens will not tolerate development at the cost of the city, their hea
lth and their children's future.
The government will have to Get with the Program, work on mutually achievable goals and get on with responsible development, not divisive projects. Planning will have to be inclusive and it would have to include the cities experts, citizens and their elected representatives. Public Consultation in its truest sense will have to be the order of the day. This won't be because we citizens want to get in the way, but because we want the best of ways, the most inclusive, the most long-term, and the most environment and citizen friendly. No one is anti-development, but it is an easy casual statement to sidetrack well-meaning citizens who asked the tough questions! Clearly for the political machinery, offence is the best form of defense. The Steel Flyover Beda campaign made us Bengalureans come together as a participative democracy and grow up a little bit as citizens, so we know a little better now. A lot better, actually.
So really, please don't mess with us.
The writer is Founder, Multiversal Advisory and a concerned citizen
