By Dinesh C Sharma, Metro India, May 10, 2015
Fading singing artist Abhijeet Bhattacharya has been rightly pulped for his obnoxious remark that he made via Twitter after the conviction of Salman Khan in the Mumbai hit-and-run case. The analogy drawn and words used by the singer to vent his anger against the court verdict is not worth elaborating here. The second part of his 144-character venom against the victims of Salman’s drunk driving really shocked me. The Bollywood has-been wrote "roads garib ke baap ki nahi hai”(roads don’t belong to the poor).
Presumably, the reference to ‘garib’ here was in the context of the homeless because in the third part of his tweet Bhattacharya recalls his own experience of being homeless for one year. This led me to mull on whom our roads really belong to. Whatever may have been Bhattacharya’s intention behind his stinking online tirade, he is after all right to some extent. The poor have very little stake in our roads as it is the rich who hog this public resource. This is a harsh reality.
Roads are a public facility created by the government to help move people commute one place to another, but in effect they have been reduced to a public-funded facility to move privately-owned automobiles from one place to another. All other modes of commuting – cycling, walking, public transport, use of non-motorised vehicles etc – have been marginalised. Road use has been equated with automobile use. While government policies emphasize on developing road infrastructure for moving people and not cars, what we see in practice is the other way.
Car users have become the first claimant to road use, as is clear from articulation of people like Abhijeet Bhattacharya. In the national capital Delhi, which has automobile population of a whopping 8 million, as much as 75 percent of road space is used by cars and motorcycles which cater to just 20 percent of the commuting demand. On the other hand, public transport meets 60 percent of the travel demand by with just 5 percent of road space use. The situation in Mumbai, where the likes of Salman Khan and Abhijeet Bhattacharya live, is similar – public transport buses occupy only 6 percent of road space but carry 45 percent of traveling public.
Read full story here in Metro India
Fading singing artist Abhijeet Bhattacharya has been rightly pulped for his obnoxious remark that he made via Twitter after the conviction of Salman Khan in the Mumbai hit-and-run case. The analogy drawn and words used by the singer to vent his anger against the court verdict is not worth elaborating here. The second part of his 144-character venom against the victims of Salman’s drunk driving really shocked me. The Bollywood has-been wrote "roads garib ke baap ki nahi hai”(roads don’t belong to the poor).
Presumably, the reference to ‘garib’ here was in the context of the homeless because in the third part of his tweet Bhattacharya recalls his own experience of being homeless for one year. This led me to mull on whom our roads really belong to. Whatever may have been Bhattacharya’s intention behind his stinking online tirade, he is after all right to some extent. The poor have very little stake in our roads as it is the rich who hog this public resource. This is a harsh reality.
Roads are a public facility created by the government to help move people commute one place to another, but in effect they have been reduced to a public-funded facility to move privately-owned automobiles from one place to another. All other modes of commuting – cycling, walking, public transport, use of non-motorised vehicles etc – have been marginalised. Road use has been equated with automobile use. While government policies emphasize on developing road infrastructure for moving people and not cars, what we see in practice is the other way.
Car users have become the first claimant to road use, as is clear from articulation of people like Abhijeet Bhattacharya. In the national capital Delhi, which has automobile population of a whopping 8 million, as much as 75 percent of road space is used by cars and motorcycles which cater to just 20 percent of the commuting demand. On the other hand, public transport meets 60 percent of the travel demand by with just 5 percent of road space use. The situation in Mumbai, where the likes of Salman Khan and Abhijeet Bhattacharya live, is similar – public transport buses occupy only 6 percent of road space but carry 45 percent of traveling public.
Read full story here in Metro India
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