By Dr. K. Javeed Nayeem, MD

Very recently it was announced that our city would be free from ‘Tiger Menace’ after our Traffic Police decided to wind up the arrangement of hiring tow trucks to pick up wrongly parked vehicles. The reason for this termination was that there were numerous complaints from the public that the persons entrusted with the task of picking up such vehicles were harassing owners of vehicles that had been correctly parked too.

I have myself seen many instances of bitter arguments on the roadside over such issues. On one occasion I was very distressed to see a screaming, elderly lady, running behind a tow truck that started moving away after having picked up her two-wheeler. She was so agitated that in her frenzy to catch up with the truck she was completely unmindful of the heavy traffic around her which could have knocked her down. As a doctor I was also worried that in view of her age she would end up having a stroke or a heart attack. So I stopped my car alongside her and pointed out to her that instead of endangering her life by blindly running behind the truck she could just hire an autorickshaw to reach the Police Station to claim her vehicle. That was when she tearfully told me that her hand-bag with all her documents and the cash she had drawn from her bank were in her scooter and the persons who picked it up did not have the courtesy to tell her which Station they were taking it to even when she enquired about it !

That was when I asked her to get into my car and after following the tow-truck dropped her at the Police Station where it stopped. Now, with the scrapping of towing arrangement we may have put an end to such harrowing incidents but the problem posed to smooth flow of traffic by wrongly parked vehicles remains. The difficulty faced by motorists in the central business district of city who have no place to park their vehicles even for a short while also remains and it is very well-known but only perhaps to their users.

I say this because all the others, especially the civic authorities whose PAID duty it is to provide the bare minimum, short-term parking space required for vehicles, seems to be especially blind to this pressing need of tax-paying citizens. But we all know that new parking space cannot be created in the heart of a city that simply has no open spaces. All that we can do is to allot the already available parking place for short-term use by legitimate short-term users by charging a small user fee for it.

The fact that already scarce parking space is regularly usurped free of cost by vehicles that are parked all day long on a daily basis is something that is very well-known to all. People who are forced to visit the business areas in the city for their shopping, banking or other short-term needs are consequently the ones who face the greatest difficulty in finding a place to park their vehicles which can be very frustrating. More often than not they have to park their vehicles a very long way off and walk to the places they have to visit. And if it is for shopping that they are out, they have to lug heavy shopping bags when they head back to their vehicles.

This exercise becomes all the more cruel if age is not on their side. In these days of lonely living it is very common to see elderly people burdened by shopping bags, huffing and puffing all the way to their vehicles with pained expressions on their wrinkled faces as they make way through crowded sidewalks, buffeted by much younger people who always seem to be in a hurry. From a very long time we have been hearing announcements from our Corporation authorities that paid parking would be introduced in our city. We were even told that parking meters have already been acquired and that they would soon be installed on a trial basis on Ashoka Road and Devaraj Urs Road but no action has been taken in implementing it. These are in fact the two roads where much business activity goes on but which are exactly the ones which are clogged all day long with vehicles of shop-keepers themselves without any room remaining for vehicles of their customers!

There seems to be an invisible but very powerful lobby of vested interests that seems to be deterring the introduction of paid parking in our city. It is time citizens question the reasons for the delay in bringing in this facility which already exists in many other cities including Bengaluru and insist on having it here too. Paid parking through the use of ‘Pay and Display’ arrangement where a pre-paid ticket is obtained by the vehicle user and displayed on the dashboard has been found to be very effective in making short-term parking space available to all those who need it during peak business hours.

Two-wheeler owners can be asked to pay a parking fee against a printed token obtained from a similar machine managed by an attendant. The whole arrangement can be out-sourced to an external private agency which should be paid a percentage of the fee collected instead of an annual tender fee to preclude any possibility of ‘syndicated underbidding’ to cheat the authorities as we see in most such arrangements at Railway Stations, bus stands and government hospitals. I am sure that many of our unemployed and even physically challenged youth will come forward to take up the responsibility of manning these parking zones if they are established which can create lucrative job opportunities for them. But let us see some action here instead of just hearing announcements. And the sooner, the better !

An Ode to Hope!

The last few water birds that used to call the Karanji Lake their home have left. The last few fishes that had managed to frolic in the last remaining pools on its bed have died. And, the last few lotuses that are still there to tell visitors to our city what a beautiful lake Karanji once was are also about to wilt ! And, this summer nothing can change this painful state. Yes, nothing. Because, like men always do, we only talk and do nothing! But hope is eternal. I take solace from the words of the Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, “Dil na umeed to Nahin, Naakaam hee to hai! Lambi hai gham ki sham magar sham hee to hai!” (I am only unsuccessful but not bereft of hope! The night of sorrow is long no doubt but there is a dawn to it!)

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