Sadak pe chalo

there were to be no pavements. he was being dead serious, and the municipal corporation officials who were present were only protesting mildly. the speaker elaborated on the subject. the no new pavement policy had a caveat: if a local ngo could guarantee that there would be no hawkers, there could be a pavement. there you have it. straight from the horse's mouth (or whichever animal now rules at the municipal corporation).the new solution to the old problem of hawkers taking over pavements: do away with pavements. it's a natural progression in a thought process which has regarded footpaths as a dispensable part of our road network. whether you are at trombay or timbuctoo, calcutta or calicut, thiruvanathapuram or oodhagamandalam you can be sure of one thing. the pavements are shrinking. like cloth which hasn't been pre-shrunk, what was a jhabba has become a chaddi, and before you can say 'striptease!' that will have gone too. the only part of mumbai which has a proper pavement (as opposed to a pooper pavement) is marine drive. but that was built by the british. if you are reading this in another part of india, you too will know of one shining example of a pavement still being a pavement, but bets are off that it was, (a) built by the brits (b) it is near the sea and away from busy thoroughfares, making it unattractive to either hawker or slum-dweller. the environmentalist who bemoaned the passing away of the pavement hadn't finished with them. he said passionately, we are all pedestrians. all of us, even those with cars. for we have to at least walk from our cars to our homes or to our offices. now you know why environmentalists remain environmentalists. they never progress and become ministers and things because they are so much out of touch with reality. the truth is: no minister is ever a pedestrian. his car picks him up from his home front door and drops him at his office front door. and there are enough hangers — on prostrating themselves on the floor to soften the blow of having to walk the office corridor (i used to see a minister run around in a large public garden for exercise every morning. his security guards had to run with him). the senior administrators who work in the civil service and are the ministers' main advisers in policy formulation, also stopped being pedestrians years ago. if you are not a pedestrian, you can't think like a pedestrian. if you are not a pedestrian, you don't know why you walk on the road. it's not because you enjoy being a jay-walker and the thrill of being hit by a car, but because pavements in all our cities, especially in the busiest areas where most office-goers have to walk, have become shopping malls, offering everything from shoes for your feet to helmets for your head, and things in between. if they aren't shopping malls, they are migrant homes. if you are a pedestrian, you know this too well. you also know that hawkers aren't the only occupants of footpaths. there are very many other unsurpers. they start from the utility companies. services like telephones, electric supply, water services and the like dig up roads and pavements with equal zeal right through the year. but they repair the roads, sooner than later; pavements get fixed later, if at all. then there are the legal — unlike hawkers who are illegal — occupants of pavements: milk dispensing booths of government milk schemes, storage areas for goods confiscated by the municipality from illegal hawkers (a real irony this: clear the space for one and fill-it-officially-with the other), and additional storage space to keep cartons and over flowing waste-collection bins from shopping centres. when the police force decided to be more visible and accessible, where do you think they put up their chowkies? when a shiv sena government came to power in maharashtra and announced a populist scheme to provide snacks very cheaply, where do you think the booths were constructed? it's clear that in the overall scheme of things, pedestrians have no rights. apart from the four-wheel drive mentality of policy makers, the other reason that these rights aren't recognised is that pedestrians have no lobby. car manufacturers form a club, taxis have unions, hawkers bring in money (which is a terrific lobby) and slum-dwellers who dwell on pavements have votes (which is even better than a lobby). if pedestrians formed a lobby of their own, they would have the advantage of numbers. but who is going to get them together? which is why all pedestrians have today are their feet. and they certainly aren't taking them anywhere in a hurry. bombaytimes@timesgroup.com