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Indians are yet to respect public spaces

Earlier this week, a man tragically died after being mauled by a white tiger in the Delhi Zoo. Inevitably, a tumultuous media debate ensued over who was at fault. The zoo authorities and sundry wild-lifers insisted the man should not have climbed into the tiger's enclosure in the first place. True, the opponents argued, but the zoo should have taken steps to, first, ensure he couldn't have done so and, second, to save him. Both arguments have their merits. But both are also an unwitting comment on the behaviour or lack of it of Indians in public places.

Indeed, visitors to the zoo are a good example of this. The sight of people openly flouting rules or strictures from zoo personnel about feeding animals, teasing and trying to injure them for sport is so common that it is taken as the norm. The fact that the victim, even if he were differently abled in some way, thought nothing of ignoring two strictures by security guards to keep his distance from the edge of the big cat enclosure is but the tragic result of an established pattern of conduct that extends far, far beyond this particular incident and individual. Whether it comes to standing in queue, obeying traffic rules, not littering, spitting and shouting or generally behaving with decorum and consideration in public places, Indians appear to be pathologically unable to adopt the kind of behaviour that people in southeast Asia and China take for granted. The upshot of this is that India has developed a reputation as one of the dirtiest and most unsafe countries in the world. Ironically, too, this is the one trait that unites Indians across class, caste, creed, religion and region. The man who died such a horrifying death at the Delhi zoo was a daily-wage labourer living on the margins of society. But his rule-flouting behaviour can by no means be called an outlier or a result of his circumstances. As anyone who has travelled on an airline or a first class train compartment, driven on a city road, eaten at a tony restaurant or attended a public event like an exhibition or concert can attest, India's thrusting, aggressively aspirational middle class and its rich are scarcely exemplars of model public behaviour. Indians today are travelling like never before and are exposed to global best practices in public behaviour. Curiously, little of this seems to rub off on them at home.

There are two consequences to this national penchant for bad behaviour. One is general public safety (as distinct from crime). This can be seen in the nature of annual traffic-related deaths. Although India is not the worst offender in the world, its figure of over 130,000 deaths is among the worst. More to the point, a good proportion of those deaths are the result of accidents caused by the wilful flouting of traffic rules - jumping signals, driving down the wrong side of the road, speeding, not wearing protective gear like helmets and seatbelts and jaywalking. The number of people who die each year crossing train tracks when the signal is green is past counting. Since life is tragically cheap in overpopulated India, there is little public pressure to remedy this problem.

The other consequence is socio-economic. Poor standards of behaviour make India's public places in general unpleasant places to frequent. Between litter, spittle and the sight of men relieving themselves in public, India's parks, gardens and beaches have lost a great deal of their charm. This applies to places of tourist interest as much as urban recreational grounds. This has the consequence of accentuating the divide between rich and poor; those who can afford it create exclusionary spaces for their recreation and stay away from places in which the poor and middle class entertain themselves - in stark contrast to, say, Central Park in New York or the commons in the United Kingdom. This, as much as anything else, indicates the distance India has to travel to lay claim to globalisation.