Being practical is being smart

Being practical is being smart

Published in The Times of India on 21st December 2014

Every morning our heart leaps with joy when we read about the wondrous developments that are planned for Vizag. Apparently we are going to be a smart city. The mental imagery of this idea is quite enticing. I can visualize eager young executives riding gleaming Metro coaches and the BRTS to work and back. Stylish hospitals delivering babies, who go to smart schools and universities, get qualified, and go on to work in factories and ITES companies. Tourists descending on Vizag and spend bushels of money, they go swimming, wind surfing and sun bathing in swim suits. Our elderly, fortified by excellent health services, sit at the beach (with their binoculars, ensuring that the sun bathers in swim suits are safe). All citizens living in clean green living spaces with parks and houses like in Singapore. Children play in the park and the sound of their laughter permeates the air. What a glorious wonderful future we will have in this fair city of ours.

Quite excited about the prospects, I went out to see the current status of our city. What I found was this. All over Vizag government bodies are in a state of decay. The Andhra University is dilapidated; every building needs repairs and renovation. The AU quarters sitting on prime property between the University and the beach looks like an aftermath of nuclear holocaust. The venerable King George Hospital and every other government hospital is a mess barely able to cope with the press of patients. Every government school in the district is falling apart. Of the 4,087 government schools in the district, 1,060 have no toilets for girls and 2315 have no toilets for boys. More than 1883 toilets are dysfunctional. Where decent toilets are available, they are kept locked up. Every public health clinic in the district is in a state of disrepair.

Our city roads are riddled with potholes. Except for the beach road we have no usable footpaths anywhere. Vendors occupy the pavement, drain cover slabs are broken or missing everywhere.    Rubble - from works taken up years ago - still lie strewn on the road sides. The roads are third world standards. Manhole covers protrude over or sink below the road level. Trenches cut across roads for connecting water or sewerage lines are never filled and finished. Cables hang everywhere like some giant spider went berserk and spun its web all over the city. New portions of the town from Madurawada to Pendurti have neither underground drainage system nor roads with pavements. VUDA takes development fees from builders and then forgets to do the development. The old port town is in shambles and the, railways residential areas look like slums.

The Sewerage Treatment Plants handling our city’s sewerage have not been working for ages. A large proportion of the contents of our potty are discharged into the sea and eventually ends up in the fish that we eat. Our beach road stinks where geddas discharge their smelly contents. Our city is overflowing with garbage both plastic and organic. Government offices are filled with cobwebs on the ceiling, dirty floors, rickety furniture, files and registers stacked on the floor. Toilets that appear not to have been cleaned since the buildings were built. Anything facility run by the government is generally shoddy. Why is it that buildings maintained by corporations and private enterprise can look good for decades whereas government buildings go to seed soon after construction?

Ask any official as to why they cannot maintain their facilities; deliver decent roads, or a standard level of public service. You will get the same answer. “We don’t have the budgets”. Despite paying our taxes diligently we are told that there simply is not enough money to maintain structures and deliver quality services in Vizag. This brings us to the question: Why are we talking about investing Lakhs of Crores on making Vizag a smart city when we cannot even afford to repair our existing city? All the public want is a cleaner city, a healthier city, a city with easy transport and safe roads for pedestrians, a city with adequate water, electricity and good roads. Citizens simply want a Vizag where we can pursue our studies, professions and businesses with ease and live comfortably.

The reality is that our city is already decaying because of apathy, neglect and lack of funds. Will we be making expensive new structures and extending the city and let them decay as well? When the next new facilities decay will we go and make another “smart city” and let that decay as well? During these austere times should we not be spending a few thousand crores to fix our present city rather that spend lakhs and lakhs of crores on a fancy new one? After all the common man will have to pay for everything by way of more taxes and higher prices while the politicians and some businesses will get rich in the process we will have to pay the bills.  No one is paying for our new smart city, despite what some papers have been reporting the USA is only offering to sell us goods and services that American companies can provide and that too at market prices. There is no charity here it’s all business. Vizagites must insist that we fix and improve our present city in small incremental steps. Let government concentrate on real work and cut out the hype. Let us make our local administration not only responsible but accountable to the taxpaying public. The key to being smart is first being practical.