Bhubaneswar: A City of Carpet Pullers

D N Singh Bhubaneswar, the state capital of Orissa, which prides itself of being a heritage city for myriad reasons, has been turned into a city of carpet-pullers by the traffic police-Municipality combine. Put your feet anywhere, someone or the other is there to pull it away. Park your vehicle anywhere, on the road side or on the kerbs, you will be hounded by a green jacketed man or woman who will give you a ten rupee ticket for parking. Even if a man parks his four wheeler or two wheeler for a brief while and hops into an ATM counter to withdraw money, he has to cough up Rs 10 for that before he leaves. If you happen to stop at a few more places for buying or anything else, you become poorer by 30 to 40 rupees. It is the Municipal Commissioner who knows whether it is fine or charge for being a Bhubaneswarite ! Even the open spaces inside the City’s major government hospitals have been taken over by the city Municipality. It annoys the average man, and why should it not? For the hospital, the facilities there and the shops cluttering the whole area, have all been paid for by the tax payer. Rubbing salt into the wounds is the behaviour of the person who owns the parking ticket trade. You dare not tell him that you will not pay for a minute or two stop for fear of his insulting behaviour. Interestingly, parking in these areas is also not legal. But the trade is sanctioned by the Municipality`s self-serving publicity hounds. In the city there must be more than six lakh vehicles, two & four wheelers put together (excluding the marauding auto-rikshaws). But has the municipality provided even one acre of decent parking area? However, what is most visible is a race by Municipality mandarins to preen for the video cameras for whatever little they do in VIP areas where the aam janta has no access. The public exchequer is being fleeced of lakhs a month for the latest beautification drive by the Municipality; painting all the government owned boundary walls throughout the city with Pattachitra (an indigenous folk art of Orissa ). Fine. But below the boundaries of the heritage town, runs the municipality’s drains, teeming with effluents, garbage and even human waste which apparently skips the notice of the Municipal personnels. Merely paintings of pattachitras can not hide the outrageous lapses. Believe or not, a city which the Chief Minister wants to paint at par with any modern city in India has, so far, no abattoir. Imagine the plight of children walking on city roads flanked by open-air slaughter shops, with the bleat of goats, screams of chickens and obnoxious smells emanating from them. If you are on a shopping spree of an evening, to places like Shahid Nagar or Bapuji Nagar, the marketing nerve centres of this most unplanned capital city, be prepared to face the music from the local police station squad. These lathi-wielding `goons` in uniform would drag away your vehicle or slap a fine you would not forget easily. Where does one park one`s vehicle? Not here, is the common refrain! All the roads inside the market area are either chocked by heavy traffic or the lanes are cut to half due to some unending repair work by the Municipality or the PHD. On top of this, the disposition of the men in Khaki are often so offending, that it seems they would never learn to behave. This is a reminder for the Commissioner of Police and the Municipal Commissioner that their men cannot go on behaving in such an uncivilized manner with people whom they fleece from dawn to dusk, to build rock gardens flanking VIP roads, and to deck posh bunglows of the people whose contribution to the exchequer is virtually nil. It is only the common man that the police radar catches, while criminal elements who plunder the beleaguered populace day and night are never traced, let alone caught. Time has come to review these feudalistic and offending attitudes.