Your Recipe for a Better Mumbai !!
Yesterday the PM suggested a few thing he and his government will do to make Mumbai the global city it should have been eons ago.
Amongst them are the regular infrastructure development, flood water control schemes, et al…
Sending a fresh flow of adrenaline coursing through Mumbai’s veins and boosting its campaign to turn itself into a city of global standards, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Thursday said the city needed “the best urban infrastructure India can afford”.
launching the ambitious Rs 11,446 crore Mumbai-Delhi Dedicated Freight Corridor (DFC) project at the railway ground in Parel, Singh said Mumbai needed many more such projects to maintain its position as the economic capital of the country.
Read more of it here.
Now I don’t doubt the intentions of PM Singh. There have been and are bigger crooks leading our country who have said similar things. Hopefully our man will stick to his words.
However…..what are your suggestions as an living, breathing and enduring Mumbaiker ??
Let the comments flow.
This is a good idea, Arzan. There may not be many here, but we are not short of ideas. Mumbai does have many problems and while no city the size of Mumbai is perfect, there definitely are ways to alleviate some of the serious issues facing Mumbaikars today. Why don’t we try to first 1) identify the problems, 2) find out why they occur in Mumbai, 3) what has been done but failed, and 4) what can be done now to solve/mitigate it. I know nothing is really going to change by commenting here or any other website; significant chunk of the real work is done by the govt. out there. But we can atleast start down the track of identifying, analyzing and mitigating problems (just as we do for our personal probs all our lives), instead of sitting at home and bitching abt the issues. Moreover, with many of the issues, it is common people like us who are affected, but its us who can reach out first too.
Let me begin with one problem:
1) problem: spitting
2) reasons: people’s attitude of “sabkuch chalta hai, apne baap ki jagah hai”, ignorance & illiteracy, easy availability of cheap paan masala/gutkha, absence of fear for doing something simply because others around them are doing it freely, presence of already dirtied walls/stations/cinemas/bus-stops (broken-glass theory?).
3) Tried solutions: putting up posters on walls urging people not to spit, showing TV/newspaper advts not to spit, teaching school children abt community-living, publicizing the ill-effects of eating gutkha, maintaining a clean place/station/bus-stop/cinema so as to discourage spitting, providing trash-bins with signs “spit here” or “use me” at gardens/stations/roads.
4) Solutions that can be tried: Advertising (by state govt, ngo’s) on a war-footing abt oral cancer and other diseases due to excessive chewing of paan, showing those graphic images on TV especially during highly-watched events like cricket matches, posters in govt. clinics, urging someone calmly not to spit when noticed, wiping off the stain and hoping to melt their heart (the munnabhai way), high taxes for products with “Consumption is hazardous to health” labels making them more costly, continuing to plant more bins, continuing to educate children so next-gen shows more respect for cleanliness.
You might want to add/rectify/debate the above and/or try troubleshooting another issue. Either way, do something! As Arzan said, let it flow.