The government should take some measures to plan and widen roads and create parking space and ‘remind’ the citizens to follow road rules through some awareness programs. We citizens must also take it upon us to spread this message to our fellow-citizens and our next generation.

Now, applying this analogy to the social problems.. Who owns the chennai city? Do we own it? Not only chennai, but other metros and tier-II cities. There is no ownership, and hence no sense of ownership. When there is no sense of ownership, there cannot be any behavioral responsibility, and hence the chaos in the roads and other public spaces.

Let’s leave the ownership of the chennai city.. Do we have the ownership of atleast the street we live in? Do we have the right or freedom to maintain our street as per our convenience? Never..

There is an interesting comparison i would like to make b/w villages and cities. In villages, every villager has the participation in village affairs, and hence everyone have the ownership of the decisions taken. Enforcement of the decision is enforce through peer pressure, where every one follows that and makes other follow it. This is what called consensus based administration.

However the cities and towns are modelled (infact “Aped” ) after western systems and hence they are centralised and authoritarian based. ie, some person is authorised to look after the city/streets, and he is accountable only to his superiors. The people have no role in it. The administration takes decision on its sole discretion. The difference b/w western system and the aped indian system is that in western system, even though decision is taken by the authority, they have the sense of purpose in it, and hence consider the feedback and opinion of the people living in that city. Whereas in india, the sense of purpose is not present and the bureaucrats are isolated from common masses. (Do we know the councilor in our area???)

Thus we failed to learn from our traditional consensus based administrative system which existed for thousands of years. Such consensus based decision making is evident from the organisational structure of budhism. So it must have been present even before Buddhism.

Since this post is on behaviour on roads, I do not want to entirely diagress but there is one moment when societal conciousness among our citizens reaches a high: and ie when there are alerts of pandemics. Several years ago when there was a scare of outbreak of plague in Surat, people kept their interiors spic and span but the rubbish outside the compound walls would just not go away. And no amount of travelling in safe vehicles could safeguard people against the germs. It is sad but true that such health alerts are required to awaken our citizenry.

I did not use the term ‘national pride’ in as much as ‘national space’. Space is the kind of relationship that people have with their physical and social environment.

While population and congestion etc are indeed factors there is a behavioural relationship here of people to space that needs to be studied. As I have mentioned, there is a sense of haste to reach the destination without an eye to what a fellow-citizen on the same road is going through.