Lessons from the roads

We, Indians (including me of course), could always use a lot of Road lessons. But today I discovered that the infamous Indian roads have something to give.

The festival of lights, Diwali, is just around the corner and the conservative southern city of Chennai is bursting at its seam with people and traffic. The fact that most of the city’s migrant workforce are hurrying back to their hometowns to spend time with their family is stretching the infrastructure of the city to its limit. The city’s police have been doing a good job in controlling the chaos from spiraling out of control and at times employ tactics that blows me over. Just the other day at the Wavin junction in Mogappair the police signaled me to drive on the right side of the road to clear the area. He held traffic on all sides of the four way junction to let us pass and he did well, he was able to clear the logjam at close to twice the speed of what he could do by using only one side of the road as mandated by laws.

The laws require us to drive on the left side of the roads (reminds me of the joke – when a foreigner asks an Indian as to which side of the road they drive – the left or right, the Indian supposedly replied that they drive on what is left of the road! :)) but the traffic constable wanted me to break the law. The reason is the infrastructure constraints, a problem with the system. When the infrastructure improves the law would automatically be followed.

Of late the Indian society has been hearing about scandals and scams and corruption. Everyone talks about punishing the guilty but no one talks about addressing the source of the problem, including Mr. Anna Hazare and Mr. Arvind Kejriwal. A Gestapo like power wielding Jan Lokpal with jurisdiction over the judiciary, legislature and executive is not the solution nor shaking and breaking the system going to help.

Remember punishing me or the constable or both is not addressing the problem, improving the infrastructure is going to make the problem disappear. Dear politicians and civil society warriors please start driving your own vehicles; there are lessons to be learnt from the roads too. :)