As I travel through north America after nearly 32 years, I find the development has been more in terms of even better infrastructure than what I experienced in the ‘70s. The Metropolitan Boston Transit Authority , The Montreal Metro, Quebec bus system were all very inexpensive and user-friendly. I expect they are all heavily subsidized – a fact that the pro-capitalists in our country will never speak about. In a sense the “poor” and the “middle class” who uses these facilities are getting benefits of the tax largely paid by the “rich”. In our country, I am sure proper studies will show that the poor subsidise the rich: look at the percapita “subsidy” on Kerosene – poor people’s product versus the percapita subsidy on cooking gas. The recent ads by the petroleum ministry justifying the price increases themselves indicate that the small percentage the population who are cooking gas consumers are pampered more than the kerosene consumers whose number must be several times more. I would suspect if we can compute the subsidies that the air traveler enjoys (T-3airport costs are more than 10 thousand crores) or the subsidies for treated water flowing out of the taps of households ( a small percentage) who have homes with running water supply, we can establish that contrary to “capitalist” societies, Indian society is the one which favours the rich and short changes the poor. Of course, the public school system in North America which is patronized by more than 90% of the population is another stark example that India is hardly socialistic compared to the capitalist US. Canada is even more socialistic with free health care etc. The irony is even this good a system - compared to ours - is criticized since US is a harshly self-critical system.
Talking about water, what prevents us from adopting the technology of waterless urinals that I found in many places here? With acute water shortage and, in fact, absence of running water supply in many public places, this technology must be very relevant for us. Is the initial expenditure for these units so prohibitive that we can not adopt them? Do all the “babus” and “nethas” who gallivant around the globe ever notice these initiatives and think about adopting them in our country? They only want to have global standard airports, shopping malls or theme parks – and ,of course, sports stadiums which will be used a few times in a decade!
1 comments:
Well, all what the babus get to see are the airports, malls and theme parks and hence they want to imitate them in India. They are largely pretending to be unaware about the common man’s plight in search of clean washrooms. Many would prefer their bladders to burst off rather than use these public toilets.
I read an article few days back which says that it is very easy to build toilets which also give electoral mileage to the parties, but few weeks after the inauguration, there would be hardly anyone using it, because of the maintenance issue. There comes a requirement of daily wage labourers who would demand for a permanent position and then strikes and dharnas and all such labour issues would sprout up. Hence it is only understandable that rulers are acting ignorant on this fact.
This is an issue worth highlighting. Afterall physiological needs come right down at the Maslow’s pyramid. The answer to this would be as you suggested waterless urinals or ecosan toiltets. If some of them are built up atleast on an experimental basis, few of the commuters could be benefited.
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