India's Roads Becoming Killing
Fields For The HomelessBy Vidyadhar Date
24 November, 2006
Countercurrents.orgSeven construction workers sleeping in their huts on the footpath on Mumbai's upper class seaside Carter Road in Bandra were killed on November 12 by a black Toyoto Corolla car.
At the wheel was Alistair Pereira, 21, an affluent college drop-out, accompanied by five friends returning from a party thrown by a liquor company at the five-star Taj Land's End hotel in Bandra.
That is shocking enough. But things are much worse. A good section of the Mumbai elite is now blaming the pavement dwellers, the victims, accusing them of encroaching on public space. A prominent figure in the advertising world , the long-haired, bearded ,Pralhad Kakad , shocked a nationwide audience in a discussion on the car crash on CNN-IBN television channel recently by making remarks against the pavement dwellers.
Aabad Panda, the lawyer for the alleged culprit driver, said `it is easy to blame the car driver but no one expects people to be sleeping on the roads in the first place.' He has also appeared for Salman Khan, India's leading film star, who is being prosecuted for driving wrecklessly in a drunken condition and causing the death of a worker of a bakery who was sleeping on the roadside, not far from the site of the Carter Road crash.
These crashes are connected to drunken driving. But even otherwise wreckless driving is rampant in India which has one of the worst records in road crashes. It is a shame that road crash deaths in India are increasing while they are falling in the developed world. In India the rich are incresingly killing the poor on roads as neoliberalism has widened income gaps steeply and made the affluent more arrogant.
What is worse is that Mumbai is sought to be turned into a world class city fit for global capital at the expense of workers. The workers killed in the car crash were not encroachers, they were migrants from Andhra Pradesh who had been brought into the city for construction work for laying a better infrastructure to suit the interests of the capitalist class.
It is the duty of the municipal corporation in Mumbai and other agencies to provide basic amenities of shelter, health and education to workers but nothing of this is being done.
The authorities are obsessed with serving the interests of the car lobby and are deeply unsympathetic to the plight of other road users like pedestrians and cyclists who are seen as a
nuisance.
A worker Vijay Maksare, 32, riding a bicycle was pushed by a traffic police constable at a traffic junction in Dadar on June 12 in 2006. He fell down and was fatally run over by a bus.Traffic rules are blatantly violated right opposite Mantralaya, the state government headquarters. So, it is hazardous to walk across the pedestrian crossing here. And this happens though government ministers and top bureaucrats live just a couple of buildings away.
A retired inspector general of police V.W. Pradhan living nearby, has been complaining to the authorities for years but to no avail.
Though hundreds of thousands of people walk daily for economic activity in Mumbai there are no worthwhile facilities like footpaths or street furniture like roadside benches for them. Bicycle tracks are unheard of in Mumbai. The elite wants to imitate the worst model of automobilisation from the West but does not want to imbibe the West's better model of cycle tracks and decent footpaths.
The media is full of reports of promotion of new car brands glorifying speed, how a car picks up speed of over a hundred km in just a few seconds and so on. But the elite is totally unconcerned with the immobility of the vast majority of people who are crammed like sardines in overcrowded trains.
The crushing of the poor on the roads in Mumbai is increasing and it is not surprising considering that the upper class is becoming so bullish. The same brazeness exists in the rural areas where dalits, the most underprivileged, are routinely discriminated against.
Four dalits were killed in a public square in broad daylight in Khairlanji village in Bhandara district of Maharashtra in September. These included two women who were raped. It is only now that the issue has evoked a public outcry.Maharashtra's minister for home (law and order) R.R. Patil faced public protests at a meeting organised by Maharashtra Times, a Marathi daily of the Times of India group, in Mumbai on November 22.
Mr Jogendra Kawade, a forceful speaker and member of the Maharashtra legislative council, said members of the state government should be flogged at the martyrs' memorial, Hutatma Chowk. He said some groups, far from supporting dalits, were taking out processions against dalits.
Dalits had reacted to the atrocities angrily. But the home minister sidetracked the issue by blaming Maoists who had been gaining strength in the area.
Leave A Comment
&
Share Your Insights
Get CC HeadlinesOn your Desk Top