------------------------------------------------------------------------ Remembering Aquino Braganca (b. 6 April 1924), who fought for freedom of the former Portuguese colonies in Africa. An online tribute http://aquinobraganca.wordpress.com/ (includes many historical references, some photographs and documents)
------------------------------------------------------------------------ *Democracy and the Small Car The political role of the small car is as important as its environmental impact. * Economic & Political Weekly April 4, 2009 vol xliv no 14 The collapse of public transport in the past few decades has been a stark feature of almost all urban areas in India. Significantly though, this matter has only found tangential reference in public discourse through issues like urban air pollution. Independent India has witnessed a sixfold rise in its urban population, and even though urbanisation remains low by the standards of the industrialised countries, close to 300 million of our citizens live in urban areas. It is important to realise that in order to thrive cities are crucially dependent on easy and inexpensive mobility of its residents over its urban space. Unfortunately, like other public infrastructure, public transport has been grossly neglected by city administrators, state and central governments, and this neglect has impacted the urban poor the most. The ability to travel within the city is essential to actualise the economic and cultural potential of the place. Residents need to travel for work, for education, for socialisation and for procuring the needs of daily life. The more the areas of the city are within the easy reach of a particular citizen, the further her potential ability to increase choices of work, residence, consumption and socialisation. Increase in either the time or money required for such travel proportionately reduces the urban citizen’s ability to participate in civic and economic activities of the city and thus impacts adversely on her. As cities have expanded and distances within each urban space have increased manifold, the ability to travel these distances has reduced. The public transport in cities which independent India inherited was slowly allowed to wither away. The older metropolitan areas still retained a rudimentary public transport system based on buses but these were built on truck chassis and were never enough to handle the growing demands on public transportation. The emergent cities and semi-urban areas were largely left to depend on “innovations” which were mostly diesel machines fitted onto a locally assembled chassis of three or four wheels known by different names in different parts of India. All in all, public transport in urban India has been a disaster – overcrowded, slow, unsafe and often, unavailable. It is in this context that one needs to view the growing numbers of private vehicles, both two-wheelers and cars. In 1951 there were five private vehicles for each bus in India but today there are 80 private vehicles for each bus. Not only have municipal administrators and governments neglected public transport, they have actively subsidised private transport through fiscal, administrative and planning measures. Road tax on buses, even when calculated on the basis of passengers carried, is 10 to 12 times that on cars. In a city like Delhi, buses only use 5% of the city’s roadspace but carry close to 60% of its travelling public, while cars and two-wheelers ferry only 20% of its population but hog threefourths of its roads. Ultimately then, the neglect of public transport shows itself as a class issue where investments in urban mobility – flyovers, parking lots, wider roads, smaller pavements, etc – are all focused on easing the mobility of the middle classes in urban India. The orchestrated media campaign against faster and safer bus services through the Bus Rapid Transit corridors only indicates the strength of class interests seeking to mould urban transport systems. It is in this twin context of the centrality of mobility to urban living and the collapse of urban public transport that the popularity of the recently launched Tata Nano should be understood. It is worthwhile to remember Ratan Tata’s oft repeated statement that the inspiration for the Nano was the struggling middle class family perched precariously on a two-wheeler. Such a family, while owning personal transport, would welcome an improved public transport system which would enable them to travel in the city in comfort and safety. By enabling them ownership of a car, the Nano secures this archetypal family firmly to the interests of that class which hogs the privileges of the class-divided road. It would be a mistake to take no notice of this political function of the Nano. The Nano, despite its overt sympathies for the underprivileged road user, will only further skew the class divides which fracture our cities, apart from increasing pollution and congestion, while decreasing general safety on the roads. David Harvey, in a recent essay on the right to the city, says, “The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from that of what kind of social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies and aesthetic values we desire. The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city.” An inexpensive, safe and fast public transport system is essential not only to address the growing problems of congestion, pollution and road safety, it is also central to building a more democratic city which provides equal opportunities of mobility to all its residents. Ends-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Essay available online at http://epw.in/epw//uploads/articles/13369.pdf -- ------------------------------------------------------- Read my thoughts at www.dervishnotes.blogspot.com