Vision of Life; by Sanjay: Rains, Roads, People & Traffic!

“Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.”

― Henry Ford

Well, some names need no introduction & the writer of above quote is one such, & when my sharing is about a subject which I have taken oath (to myself) not to write about i.e. roads conditions & traffic of Pune city, then his words seem apt to start it! Who better there can be than the person hailed as the father of the automobile industry but I didn’t use Ford’s words for his automobile background but for his attitude & keenness for the quality! The reason I said about the oath for not writing about roads & traffic is, so much has been written about it & yet every year the situation is getting worse, so why add frustration for both i.e. the writer & the readers is what I thought but then like the Zen story about a doctor who keep the wounded soldiers’ fit & gets frustrated watching them to go to the war & get dead or wounded again, when meet with a monk, who tells him , his job is to make the wounded ones fit as he is a doctor & the job of a soldier is to fight, so no need to get frustrated over it, I too gathered courage & decided to write about the most written topic of Pune i.e. traffic & road conditions! Here is one more aspect we are missing & that is rains about which many will say what’s big deal as we all know in rains traffic scenes become worse & even the roads get damaged to add salt on the wound but its not that simple, is my subject of sharing!

Most people will blame traffic delays & chaos to poor public transport which indeed is a major reason but a lot depends on other aspects also as how many people who blame traffic mess themselves have ever shown patience to wait for the PMPML bus or even try the Metro of late, is the question I want to ask. Or how many use Autorickshaw or Ola/ Umer (private taxi) , giving up their 4 / 2-wheeler, is also we should ask. And I know the impatient answer, why would we do that, who will wait & look at the public bus service, how can you expect us to use it & I won’t say you are wrong but then this impatience is also one of the major reasons for the traffic mess we are witnessing on the roads, is also a fact, right? There may be a hundred reasons for not using public transport or taxi or rickshaw but in any such transport system there has to be some adjustments & if the entire city doesn’t want to make any adjustment, then the traffic issue will never be solved, is my subject of sharing!

Coming back to the core i.e. road conditions & its impact on the traffic speed then rain induced water logging is the major reason for the road damages so if we want good roads then first, we must learn to take care of rain water! This may look very simple, but it needs planning from the very beginning, which is missing is a fact as in our country a city gets developed first then we make the roads & when this is your working style then the roads are bound to fail on dealing with the rain water problem, which is happening. Every year rains cause water logging on the same spots & water is the biggest enemy of any structure (even sheer concrete) , may it be flowing or still. Even the road portions where water flows aways the surface of all such roads gets eroded with the current of the flow & we need to reduce this flow of water on the roads which only can save the roads damaging from forming of potholes (I love the word, Khadde) & we are not doing anything about it! Time & again it’s been proved the closed rain water drains are insufficient to carry the rain water of the changed pattern of rain water & another aspect is constant choke-up of closed rain water drains because of our attitude of throwing garbage in it (or anywhere)! We blame PMC/ PCMC for not cleaning these rain water drains before every monsoon but in the first place why these lines are needed to clean is itself the question I want to ask to the citizens & reason is, it’s the citizens of this very city dump everything they don’t want around in the rain water drains, which makes the job of the civic body harder! Rainwater lines are meant to carry rain water but every year the cleaning team finds from sofa sets (unusable of course) to carcases of domestic animals & what not in these lines & this aspect plus the insufficient size of these lines makes most of the rain water flow on the roads or wherever it is possible. And its because of careless attitude of the citizens even if the size of rain water lines even if we increase then also the chocking up of the lines will make them of no use in rains, is a fact! Here in this city, we don’t spare our open rivers & keep throwing garbage in it (I am not even mentioning encroachments) to such extent that the local-body has to build jail like framing along the sides of every bridge on our rivers so the citizens won’t throw garbage in these rivers, what else can be expected but to chock the rain water lines with our dirt!

And then comes another most important & neglected aspect of the reason for water flowing on the roads & that is, rampant concretization of every available piece of land, may it be private or public! Many people ask me, don’t we have rain water harvesting rules or policy for building any structure; my reply is, yes, but so do we have a helmet policy also while driving! Leave out the sarcasm but we speak about many things & rain water harvesting is one of them as we don’t give a damn about the rain water unless it will someday blow us (read as flow us) away, which it is already doing by damaging our roads but we are not accepting it! If we absorb majority of rain water which was earlier case then basic quantity of the rain water which will flow on the roads will be less, reducing clogging or flowing on the roads & eventually reducing the damage to the road surface, even a first year civil engg boy will tell you this but we all so call bosses of engineering are ignoring this logic of managing rain water! And the reason is, our urban policies have become blind to balance the nature with development, may it be water or green cover or earth cover, first we must improve them if we want to start making good roads! As all new buildings are required to have a RWH (rain water harvesting) compulsory but are we monitoring it & its outcome, what system do we have in place to do so? And the result is, from every developed premise (barring a few) thousands of litres of rain water flows outside of the premise & then our rain water lines are either choked or inadequate, so where this water will go, has anybody got an answer for this question?

Answer is, water will always find its path by gravity towards the low lying area & this again any science studying boy can reply but we are not accepting this simple basic science also as recently behind my society there is a nallah (once it was a stream) & PMC drainage dept were requesting to our as well neighbouring societies to allow to break our compound wall on the nallah side so their machines can enter in the nallah for cleaning. But nobody is thinking how this situation arises as for kilometres of the length on both banks of this nallah there are compound walls of adjoing buildings making entry of even PMC officials impossible so how the rain water is going to flow towards it! As here also we have blocked every such natural way of flowing rain water by illegal constructions or by wrong policies of urban planning & outcome is now we have left it to the water itself to find its own way which eventually it will & trust me we are sitting on a water bomb! As this nallah behind our building is one of thousands of such natural water carriers of the city which just a few decades back were real rain water drains as whatever rain water was coming outside of the developed premise either getting used to percolate in the earth or used to flow towards the rivers of the city via these natural streams & all of them are being blacked or encroaches & roads are doing that job, is the main reason of damaged roads in the monsoons!

Last but least alarmingly reducing green cover of the central part of the city is one more reason of increased rain water on the roads & we must create more spaces by which big trees can be planted & more rain water can be hold by their roots in the ground & here also we build big road dividers & plant the trees in between them but what about rain water which won't ever reach to their roots, who is thinking about this aspect of the job of these trees, again, answer is, nobody! And if all these problems are not enough then there is road digging which keeps going on all around the year for every known & unknown purpose & in the process damaging the surface of the roads! Reason behind this may be lack of coordination with the govt’s departments as well bad planning of the respective services but it is a major problem for road surface. In the end, it’s some road dept which has to take all the blame but actually we all in some or other way are responsible for the pot holes & road conditions & the traffic mess, is my subject of sharing!

What the city (read as govt/ planners/civic bodies) must do is, focus on developing rain water drain system on surface via open drains as well proper slopes with concrete roads & clear all the obstruction in the ways of natural water bodies, so they can carry this rain water (runoff) to the rivers, just it used to be few decades back! Keep enough space on ground level along the road for trees so the water can be percolated in earth. At the same time monitor effective (well, we can hope) rain water harvesting for every project, new as well completed too, so lesser rain water will hit the roads. Change DC rules for this aspect of development & do it fast so we won’t have to dig the ground to accommodate our greed for more parking spaces, instead go higher so the earth will be free to do its job i.e. absorb rain water & support trees! Public transport strengthening is not an over-night solution as well it depends on citizen’s attitude towards life too, but the road potholes must not be the reason for traffic delays as that’s not a thing of pride for the Smart City & this can be achieved not by pointing fingers at each other but by joining our hands only; adios with this note!

Sanjay Deshpande

smd156812@gmail.com

Sanjeevani Dev.

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