New Delhi, Mar 21: The main boulevard in the Capital, Rajpath, that connects Rashtrapati Bhavan and North and South Block with India Gate, the National War Memorial, has become an unholy dump. The waterways are dry, adorned with plastic bags and a variety of malba. When there is water, people are bathing! Security tents line the edges of the lawn with washed under-garments spread out to dry. Unpainted, scratched and decrepit looking police barricades lie about on the edge of the road in an undisciplined manner, symbolising the force. This is the pride and heart of the city. There is no look good here. Rapists run amok and the police looks on, bewildered. Shops are looted, people are shot dead in their homes, buses mow down innocent human beings, foolish motorists blow their horns incessantly for no apparent reason, taking noise pollution to unprecedented levels, maimed beggars adorn the streets at every traffic light interspersed with lazy cows, and salesmen sell their wares at main traffic junctions. It is all crazy — dangerous and wrong.
These are hazards for drivers, for pedestrians and for the city in general. Every official sees the reality and they turn a blind eye. Each morning, as buses compete with each other on the road driving recklessly at high speeds, traffic police stand by smoking beedis with their hands in their pockets allowing the horror, endorsing the breaking of all rules.
This is not representative of a shining India or of a feel good factor. If this is the situation in New Delhi, one can imagine the horrors of the other neglected cities. Small wonder that tourism is miniscule in India. And now, civil servants, stuck in the Stalinist mode with no experience of the new methodologies and technologies that the rest of the world had adopted, continue to belabour their redundant approaches to wildlife tourism and travel in general.
When you have visitors you have to clean up your dirty and corrupt act, whether in the environment sector or the building heritage sector. Our babus think they know but alas, they do not at all. They are destroying what remains by their callous and illiterate attitude. Bureaucratic control and thoughtless regulation brings corruption and loot. Forest officials allow graziers into parks and sanctuaries, making money by turning a blind eye and they berate tourism, claiming it is an intrusion.