As a resident of Delhi, I can completely relate to the writer when he says that our vision of making urbanscapes better is doomed if our leaders give direct amnesty to people who construct illegal buildings (“The city’s bleak future”, Jan.13). Delhi has a number of such settlements; some are being run as commercial spaces. As such constructions are illegal, a legal electricity connection is ruled out which results in the practice of stealing electricity from power lines and junction boxes.
There is also the lack of a common collective culture in our cities. A visit to any Indian city will have you witness people breaking queues, violating traffic rules, using roads as public conveniences and generally making it a nightmare. Despite efforts by the government to make things easy, people still turn a blind eye. The Delhi Metro is a case in point. People do their own thing despite announcements every few seconds about platform and escalator etiquette.
When the citizenry of a country does not have any sense of belonging and believes that subverting the infrastructure is the best survival strategy, then the government is not the only institution to be blamed. Things will not change unless fear is induced among Indian citizens by strictly penalising and punishing them for such behaviour.
Ritvik Chaturvedi,
New Delhi
We must stop looking at cities as the “engines of growth” because these engines are adding to pollution at unmanageable rates. The government must ponder over what former President Abdul Kalam said: “The developed India will not be a nation of cities. It will be a network of prosperous villages empowered by telemedicine, tele-education, and e-commerce....”
R. Swarnalatha,
Chennai
