Little safety in public spaces
Apathy, sloth and neglect caused the Elphinstone station disaster
It was a tragedy waiting to happen. On Friday, 22 people lost their lives in a stampede on the stairs leading out of Elphinstone Road station in the heart of Mumbai. Regular commuters will tell you that the foot overbridges at the overcrowded stations on Mumbai’s suburban train network, the city’s lifeline that handles 75 lakh commuters every day, are virtual death-traps. The dangers at this particular railway station have been repeatedly highlighted but to little effect. The railway authorities have done little to build more infrastructure to handle the increasing footfalls. They increase the number of trains so that more people can travel. But they don’t provide more space for the exploding numbers to move into and out of the stations. The result: choked exit points, especially during peak traffic hours.
Across Mumbai, it’s the same story. The bursting-at-theseams railway network is beginning to break down under the load of ever-increasing numbers. Remember the deluge of August 29 that brought the trains, and the city, to a standstill? What are the railway authorities doing about it? On Friday, they first denied there were any casualties. A responsible administration would have acted years ago. Funds are not the problem. Indifference, callousness and lack of accountability are. So many people have lost their lives, but no one will pay. Some low-ranking official may be suspended, but the top echelons of the Railways will be insulated from any fallout. This must change.
As must the approach to safety in public spaces across India. Given the country’s population, overcrowding on public transport and at public spots cannot be wished away. Pilgrim centres, train and bus stations, even public hospitals and government offices, are all in danger of being swamped. What we need are better infrastructure and more imaginative and effective crowd-control measures. And better civic sense. Friday’s stampede was set off by rumours that an overbridge had collapsed. Such things are to be expected and should be factored in while developing a crowdcontrol protocol. But all this can only come about if the authorities show respect for human life and dignity; only if they accept that citizens have a right to expect that they do not have to put life and limb at risk every time they venture out into public spaces. In this day and age, it is nothing short of criminal that so many lives have been lost because of systemic failure in the country’s biggest city. Someone must pay and it can’t be the citizen every time.
Every time a sordid story comes out of a school, the administration rushes to get more CCTVS installed. Technological solutions currently enjoy favour in every aspect of social policy. Looking at the evolution of governance practices over the last two decades, we can see the emergence of two salient tendencies. One is to isolate a problem before attacking it; the other is to look for a technical solution. Both these tendencies can be witnessed in the post-ryan rush to ‘fix’ the problem of children’s safety at school.
The Ryan incident offers a peep-hole into the hazy normalcy that envelops the routine of school management. It is pointless to distinguish between private and government schools on the question of safety. Instances of children’s vulnerability to accidents and crimes in both kinds of schools are reported frequently. These reports mostly come from urban centres, but the content they cover is just as common in rural schools.
Children’s vulnerability in schools needs to be read and understood in the wider social context. The term ‘safety’ does not allow us to acknowledge the role of this wider context in shaping our children’s life. When we say that schools have become unsafe, we conflate material conditions that might cause an accident with crime.
Poorly maintained electrical fittings, poor quality cement, broken windows can cause injury or death. These shortcomings can be overcome by improving supervision of the school plant. This remedy, however, is useful mainly in private schools where maintenance is the school’s own business. The principal of a government school has little choice in matters pertaining to the quality of the infrastructure, and often has no maintenance staff worth talking about.
Infrastructure has a role to play in the Ryan incident too, and perhaps the horror could have been averted if the school had followed the example of many other private schools where children’s toilets are used exclusively used by children.
However, this is not the core of the Ryan story. It is about a child’s encounter with crime in the school premises. Can we call this a case where the school was neither ‘safe’ nor ‘secure’? To the extent we know, the culprit at Ryan is not someone entirely external to the school. His presence reflects the new governance principle under which a school hires a number of necessary services from commercial providers.
In common parlance, we recognise this segment of the staff as ‘contractual’. Their loyalty and sense of belonging to the institution are not part of their so-called contract. If our discussion of school safety is to include protection from crime, we cannot avoid this wider context. A technological solution, like installation of more CCTVS, cannot protect our children from this vacuum of institutional loyalty that the new governance ethos creates.
Referring to this wider context is often perceived as lack of interest in finding solutions. Demand for suggestions to ‘fix’ the problem is so popular that it is seen as something natural. On the other hand, the call for deeper reflection or analysis of the wider context is seen as a sign of unwillingness to face the situation.
Ironically, it is the techno-romantics who are unwilling to face the situation, but their perception and solutions have far greater weight in the current environment than a call for reflection has. There is hardly any possibility of a dialogue between those who advocate quick technical solutions and others who want to talk about a larger reality shaping children’s life at school. Technophiliacs claim to have both immediate and long-term solutions to offer. So, while more CCTVS is being offered as an immediate step to improve children’s safety and security at school, a long-term policy is also being pushed.
It consists of police verification of all school staff—including guards, peons, ayahs, even teachers. We might think that inclusion of teachers in this list will help because there are news stories where teachers have been found guilty of sexual exploitation of the students they teach.
But getting teachers verified by the police can hardly compensate for the wholesale commercialisation of teacher education we have actively encouraged. Verification of other staff may also create some short-term confidence in the public mind, but this solution will not address the larger flaw in the new culture of school administration.
Contractual staff can’t be expected to have a personal sense of responsibility to the school. This limitation helps us imagine how someone who served the school can murder a small boy.
THE TECHNOROMANTICS ARE UNWILLING TO FACE THE SITUATION, BUT THEIR PERCEPTION AND SOLUTIONS HAVE GREATER WEIGHT IN THE CURRENT ENVIRONMENT THAN A CALL FOR REFLECTION HAS
But Modi’s toughest test is yet to come. He must now dismantle the socialist economic superstructure which is India’s lasting curse. To do so involves treating the economic organisation of a society not merely in transactional terms, but as a moral issue inextricably linked to individual rights and dignity, and moving wholeheartedly towards the only economic system that provides for such: a free-market system adapted to help those on India’s economic margins.
This then, is the call to arms. In addition to a dogged focus on anti-corruption (a necessary issue for 2014 but insufficiently ambitious for 2019), Modi needs to speak to the country in civilisational terms about the manner of its economic organisation, and seek the mandate to put the nation on the path to double-digit growth for decades to come.
In practical terms, and as a first step, it requires the sale of the government-owned banks and PSU’S in their entirety. Not re-capitalisation, not mere Npa-resolution, not partial-disinvestment of loss-making PSU’S. A complete sale. These banks and PSU’S are giant black holes that destroy capital (and our soul), or at best, use it sub-optimally. Modi cannot rebuild a nation without removing the termites from its foundation. Only on its conclusion will Modi have lived up to his own revolutionary declaration of 2014: “Government has no role in business”.
Modi may represent the last best hope for the Indian economy to achieve its true potential. If Modi doesn’t do it now, India will be condemned to this snakes-and-ladders growth for another several generations.
If not Modi, then who? If not now, then when?
The hedgehog knows.