The Smart City Administrators and It's Over-smart Citizens

Let there be no mistake about the age of Bhubaneswar. It’s not 74 years young. 

It existed for centuries and was known by many names like Toshali, Kalinga Nagari, Ekamra Kshetra, Krutibasha Katak. 

The Temple City part and the new city whose establishment we are celebrating today are two different entities culturally speaking. While the former is fondly called Bhonsar and the latter by its more formal name Bhubaneswar. The residents of the temple city call the other part Capital and the denizens of Capital City Bhubaneswar identify the other part as Old Town.

The Capital City of Bhubaneswar is celebrating its 74th Foundation Day today. On 13th April 1948, Pandit Nehru founded this new city which was planned by the German architect Otto H. Königsberger in 1946. On 19th August 1949, the Capital of the State was officially shifted from Cuttack. 

Around the same time in 1949, planning for the city of Chandigarh was also started. 

In these many years both the cities have been shaped and molded by the people who lived there earlier, who migrated to it, and the people who administer it successively. While the City of Chandigarh still prides itself as a planned city where the civic laws are seriously followed and enforced, the deterioration of Bhubaneswar from a planned city to a collapsing urban cesspool forms the conversation of many of the old-timers who have seen the city as a breezy township to its present avatar which sees flooding of rods and houses during the rainy season and houses some 400 official slums.

That brings us to the core of the issue of looking at the role of people and government in making our urban habitations unliveable even after a massive infrastructure push in the last few years. Should we continue to ignore the attitude and behavior of people who inhabit the city and continue to push capital and hope for things to change on their own?

Time to introspect on the Foundation Day of our City.

Let’s, for the time being, ignore all other factors which have contributed to forming the urban mess we live in and look only at the roads and the houses which are built over them.

With wide roads, pedestrian pathways, road dividers, overbridges, multiple lanes, every crossing having traffic lights, speed cameras, and CCTV surveillance coverage, Bhubaneswar can pride itself on its road infrastructure. You can see hundreds of crores being spent to put up this international-grade infrastructure. 

After painting a beautiful picture at the night and a few hours into the day, the picture-perfect road of the city gets filled with Cargo Trucks carrying construction material, Intercity Speeding Buses, School Buses, and Private cars of various sizes, Autorickshaws, Bikes, and hand-drawn trolleys. Driven by frenzied drivers each claiming their rightful place through absolute wrong means. A few hours of driving on a busy thoroughfare at the peak hours can cause a heart attack to a driver who plays by the grammar of driving.

While the drivers have accepted and normalized this as a fait accompli, the policemen are busy collecting fines in their bid to enforce belt, helmet, mask, window film, and parking rules as if they have daily sales targets to meet. The city sees small to big gory accidents daily which leave people dead or maimed. Luckily the city is yet to witness an accident big enough that will stir the collective conscience of the people and the authorities to do something to mend the behavior of the drivers.

Coming to the structures which are on these roads. The city administrators are yet to find the correlation between the collapsed traffic condition and the nature of the buildings abutting those roads.

Commercial establishments like hospitals and shopping malls are allowed to operate on narrow service roads which can barely carry two parallel cars, legalised vending zones are allowed to operate on either side of the road till the neck of the crossings which occupies the total pedestrian path and occupies one lane for vehicle parking. 

Rule books are referred to in letters, not in spirit. BDA and BMC have their priorities and regulating urban development aren’t one of them. 

The city has some 400+ official slums. They enjoy excellent political patronage as their loyalty (votes) can be predicted as pocketed because of the strong quid pro quo. We picture the image of encroachers and squatters who have occupied public land and made it their shops and homes. Such encroachments are a result of urban migration and a lack of economic opportunities in our villages. 

So ingrained is this typical image of encroachment in people’s minds that someone who hasn’t done the above looks like a saint. There are various ways our over-smart denizens adopt to hoodwink the laws but still manage to keep land under their de facto control by preventing others from using it.

• Running a Commercial Establishment or a shop in a building meant for residential use.
• Unauthorized cordoning off of the front area of a building in the name of the plantation or by planting trees without gaps or huge trees inappropriate for avenues.
• Building platforms around trees and planting Gods under them.
• Erecting signboards by the side of the road
• Building raised platforms in front of plots above the road level and building ramps or steps to plots on public land
• Leaving high mounds of clay or building debris and abandoned vehicles on the road.

Utilities and administrative departments are not above the blame.

• PHED building manholes and inspection chambers well above the road level.
• Electricity utilities build space-consuming distribution transformer structures adjoining roads instead of using pole-mounted structures.

Practically, anyone who indirectly or directly prevents the government or general people from using the road and space adjoining it for commutation or such purposes amounts to encroachment. The above cases demonstrate how the enlightened citizens of our cities wilfully annex land abutting their houses for exclusive usage. One such occurrence on a road is enough to affect the general flow of traffic in the whole stretch. Here the administration takes an ostrich approach towards such events encouraging the number of such events to increase.

Proper buildings, un-encroached roads, vendors and squatters free roadside, and adherence to traffic rules and parking are few of the predictors of the general attitude of the citizens towards their fellow citizens and the efficiency of the law implementing authorities. Research shows that the more disciplined the city, the more liveable it is.

So, there is more smartness in being disciplined and enforcing discipline than waiting for the magician’s magic wand to turn our cities into a piece of heaven. 

Instead of blaming the center or the earlier governments and waiting for them to solve our self-created owes, shall we start the initiative of the good citizenry from our side first and expect the administrative departments like BDA, BMC, and the STAs to do their bit to make the city livable and the roads drivable?