Apathy their style, let people suffer

Many live by the side of the Bharari-Ragyan road. Water flows to their houses through pipes buried under one of the fringes of this road. This fringe of the road is under constant digging. First, it was dug then converted into a pucca drain and then cemented drain was dug again to bury electric wires but those were found to be of a size bigger than the required, the fringe was dug again and the right size of wires were laid out, the uneven fringe was levelled. A small JCB machine is used for this constant digging.

The contractor responsible for doing all this bothered not if underneath there were water pipes carrying water to the houses and dug the pipes too. In their last venture, they pulled out my pipes and I had to make holes in my wallet to see that the water ran to my house. Recently, to the surprise of many residents and mine, I saw the fringe was dug again (See photo). What should I call it? A total apathy on part of the government or the slogan bestowed upon the PWD – road pucca; employment kuchha: road kuchha; employment pucca! It is a case of sheer lack of proper planning. A phrase is ‘measure twice cut once’. It means plan and prepare thoroughly before taking action otherwise there is waste of resources-men, money and material.

Apathy in government employees is not because they are low-paid or hungry. As far as the pay packet is concerned, I dub government employees as ‘rich servants of a poor master’. But apathetic employees are just there. Why are they apathetic? They are so because it is part of their personality. Sometimes abrasive bosses or co-workers can cause employees to tune out and they care less and less about the work they do.

The result is that the public suffers. They do not care for the good of the public for which they hold office. Sometimes a false ego of being the public masters instead of the public servants envelopes them. As ‘know-all’ personalities, they do not pay any heed to what the genuine demand of the public is. The result is that they are mirrored as arrogant.

I am, however, not throwing the mud totally on this minority of the government employees. I find myself in pain when I see cast-iron covers of manholes missing to be sold out for scrap or selling of copper wires just for a penny, telephone lines are cut. Yesterday when I was roaming on The Mall, I found a portion of good-looking raw-iron balustrade pilfered from the sitting place on top of the Rotary Hall (See photo).

Law enforcement personnel believed that it was the work of alcohol or drug addicts and because of elevated levels of unemployment individuals turn to metal theft to support themselves when legitimate or socially acceptable means of earning an income are not open to them.

Why were these thefts so little when we were growing up? I believe the reason was that we were indoctrinated right from the cradle with a rigid social moral code. Consequently, infrastructure installed by the government or municipal committee contained the assumption that ‘it has to remain as it is’. The wooden benches for resting the traveller were there on all roads. These have gone after we became independent and were replaced by cemented or iron ones.

That social moral coding, if it exists, has little effect on the public today and the genie is out of the bottle to wander free, so the alternative left with the MC or the government is to ‘save our coffers’. The cast-iron manhole covers have been replaced by cemented covers and the telephone wires are being dug two feet below the earth’s surface. The days of reverence or pity arising through rituals is the story of the past and we have to face persons, gradually growing in number with weak empathy and no moral restraint. I have, however, not lost the faith on the youth. I am waiting for the day when we start believing that government property is our own property and the law is the code that we have given to ourselves.