T N Ninan: India's Cinderella syndrome

Kejriwal's last-minute desperation to clear Delhi's air before people choke to death shows India's tendency to not act until the last minute

The Oxford historian, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, in his large tome titled Millennium: A History of Our last Thousand Years, described India as “the Cinderella civilisation of our millennium: beautiful, gifted, destined for greatness, but relegated to the backstairs by those domineering sisters from Islam and Christendom”. Looking at Arvind Kejriwal’s last-minute desperation to clear Delhi’s air before people choke to death, one can also talk of the country’s Cinderella syndrome: the tendency to not act until the clock is about to strike midnight, and then to rush for solutions. Cinderella lost her slippers in the process, India has lost much more over the decades.

 
One can think of many examples. There is the Green Revolution itself—the belated move to reform neglected agriculture after the country had suffered twin droughts in the mid-1960s and been forced to depend on food aid to feed itself. There is the 1971 war, for which India was caught unprepared (not the first or last time); Gen. Manekshaw told Indira Gandhi he needed nine months in which to get ready—a period during which the country rushed through with the purchase of all manner of armaments, including second-hand tanks from Soviet satellite countries because nothing else was available. Economic reform, introduced in baby steps through the 1980s, was rushed through only after the country went nearly bankrupt, in 1991. There is also the great haste with which the Commonwealth Games were put together at the last minute (the toilets in the Games Village were being cleaned even as athletes started arriving).

 
Everyone has known for years that Delhi’s air is unfit to breathe in the winter months. More than a decade ago, the Supreme Court provided temporary relief to the city’s residents when it forced an unwilling Sheila Dikshit to allow only gas-powered engines for public transport (politicians owned the diesel-driven buses and naturally were opposed to change). Now, in a typical Cinderella-hour solution, Mr Kejriwal has decided on the odd-even number rule for cars, though the city has had no time to prepare for such a disruptive step. Phase III of the metro system will add 75 per cent to track length and therefore accessability, and more than 50 per cent to daily ridership, but it is a year away from completion. And the idea of bus rapid transit (BRT) corridors, which would have encouraged people to move from cars to buses in phases, has been given up after a botched trial.

 

In the absence of these two pressure-relieving transport systems, Mr Kejriwal plans as an emergency step to throw over a thousand additional buses on to the roads. Other possible solutions like encouraging car-pooling (special fast lanes on arterial roads for cars with more than one passenger) have not been tried. So expect initial chaos, plus a traffic police unprepared for the sudden extra work of checking all car numbers. We might well end up with a repeat of the BRT denouement: premature demise of the idea. It does not need great knowledge of human affairs to know that this is not how societies should organise themselves. But we are, it would seem, a Cinderella civilization; we need an 11th-hour crisis before we stir ourselves.

 
So we have to ask ourselves: is the disastrous drowning of Chennai a result of the Cinderella syndrome, and ditto the Mumbai dunking 10 years ago? What about the Uttarkashi flood? Which part of the country is due next? We take pride in how good we usually (though not always) are at relief measures in a crisis, but what about action to prevent man-made crises—as all these episodes were? Perhaps a civil society organization should draw up a list of the priority issues that need attention but are being ignored—and put a Cinderella clock on each issue to indicate how close we are to midnight. It might help focus the mind.