For the last few days in Delhi, we have seen the future and it works! The howl of protests by the middle class, the only class that really is the target of both the policy and the abundantly visible homilies alike, bordered on the sublimely ridiculous, though they were reported with a straight face. “We” don’t have two cars to use on all days, “we” need to reach places on time, “what will the children do, how will we rush our parents to hospitals?” And above all, “cars do not contribute to the pollution” as much as many other economic activities do. Given time, the beleaguered middle class would have invented many more filial duties.
Janaki Nair Time was, more than 40 years ago, when “car spotting” was our favourite childhood pastime, filling long hours and small books, as a car passed by us every 15 or 20 minutes. Those were the 1960s, the time of controlled consumption, when cars were booked five to seven years in advance, phone lines were a precious commodity available only to the doctors, government officials and a few favoured, possibly rich, others. When it did arrive, the car was usually a grey or black HM Ambassador. Cycles, owned or rented, were still the main mode of transport in a town like Bangalore.
Those were the days of small markets, smaller incomes and savings that preceded every big-ticket purchase. The 1960s wartime rationing, which had placed the wheaten chapatti onto the south Indian thali, continued into the next decade when we experienced the state-mandated constraints on consumption: some of us will recall guest control orders for weddings and banquets. Devaraj Urs’ Karnataka offered citizens an opportunity to precisely measure food items that were sold in restaurants: many exercised their right to weigh idlis and vadas on the scales with as much zest as actually consuming the food.
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and the Silent Valley agitation, which foregrounded the question of what wounds we were inflicting on our common resources, both burst into our lives, ironically just when India was embarking on a long period of expanded and reckless consumption, an extended feast generously supported by banks who hurled their consumption loans at our heads. Every public sector employee squeezed what in Deng Xiaoping’s China was so aptly called the “Eight Bigs” into their tiny type-II houses. Television sets. Refrigerators. Stereos. Cameras. Motorcyles. Furniture sets. Washing machines. Electric fans.
The tyranny of the automobile By the 1990s, this began to include the automobile. Our cities became hostage to the tyranny of the automobile, and plans for flyovers, underpasses, bypasses, and highways scattered the pedestrians as the measure of city distances and growth. We saved time by consuming space in large unquestioned quantities.
This was until the early 2000s, when some of us stopped to ask ourselves why we were all spending one hour to cover 8 km, and using up precious petrol while idly standing at traffic lights. The casualties were not just daily life but social life as we knew it. Squabbles over parking became only as routine as fights over access to water. We longed to return to the safety of our homes and slam the door shut on the noxious fumes, irate drivers and insane disrespect for traffic rules, rather than visit a friend 10 miles away.
In the last few days, it is, ironically, precisely “ >being on time” that has been made possible by the odd/even formula . Some pesky violators and horn addicts apart, and the usual corruption in which the middle classes engage to continue to use their preferred mode of transport, the scheme has worked surprisingly well in enabling smooth traffic flows.
There are two lessons to be learned from this smart move of the Delhi government. Restraint, even at a time when we are constantly reminded that it is our patriotic duty to consume, can be a pleasurable state of being. We had long lost sight of the fact that the comfort of some human beings cannot be the driving principle of our cities. Urban planning was the desperate result of the recognition that contagious diseases showed no respect for the gates and walls of the urban rich, and affected all in the dark coketowns of industrial Britain. The disease did indeed produce the antidote. Here, too, there is now recognition that even the air-conditioned car and hermetically sealed upper-class life cannot guarantee the basic necessity of clean clear air.
Second, at a time when the “smart cities” initiative has generated a good deal of technobabble, > the Delhi government has shown that it costs much less to impose restraint, which goes further along in making the city a more inhabitable space for all. Successive Mayors of Bogota, Colombia, had imposed car-free days to save the city, and have built the most impressive set of cycle paths in the world. We need cleaner, more just, more democratic and happier cities, rather than smart ones, where mayor and pedestrian, single woman and old man may mingle, trade, and move with ease. The automobile cannot tyrannise the space of the street, and the sooner we have clear, broad footpaths, bikeways, and a city scale that is friendlier to pedestrians, the smarter and healthier we will all be. The Delhi experiment has shown that such dreams are not impossible.
(Janaki Nair is Professor of History at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University.)
