Of bullet trains and smart cities

As a child I would sit next to my grandmother and watch her closely as she did puja. What mystified me most about the puja was that whenever anything was missing from her puja samagri, be it flowers, chatri, chamar, naivedyam or anything else, she would offer token akshatas in the place of the missing item. Those little yellow grains of rice seemed to have magical powers, they always did the trick! Was I impressed at that time! Little did I realise that such wisdom would be put to good use in later years!
Our politicians are very religious people.If you do not believe me, watch the list of VIPs that regularly visit either Tirupati or nearer home, Simhachalam, with our money and have a VIP darshan at the expense of the hoi polloi, which spends hours in long queues. Also note that most of them sport kumkum on their foreheads, a sure sign that they regularly make their peace with their gods, before setting out to uplift us. Like my grandmother, they know they can satisfy the people with magical substitutes, grander the better, falser the more convincing.
Having come to power after an arduous and grueling campaign, they should appear to propitiate the giver of boons, the people. There is so much that is wrong with our system that they do not know where to start and how to impress the electorate. Mercifully for them, like the gods that they worship, the people are voiceless and gullible. They may be fobbed off with eloquence and substitute akshatas. Find a few catchy phrases and a handful of fancy words and bingo, people are lulled into a false sense of optimism.
There is another angle to all this. The latest census has been screaming from the rooftops that India is getting younger by the day; the number of youth far outweighs the number of aged. A new phrase coined by the media in recent times is "aspirational India", meaning the youth of India. The youth, by its very definition, is impatient, wants quick results and also glitz and glamour. So the wily ruling class has come up with quick-fix solutions to dazzle the baby boomers. How do they do it?
It's simple. Take the railways. Are they saddled with problems like running late, overcrowding, frequent accidents and poor sanitation? Take heart, the government has cooked up a bonanza for you. We will get bullet trains! The latest is that Visakhapatnam would be linked to Chennai by a bullet train! In a system where the most basic facilities like hygiene, safety and punctuality are lacking, we want to run bullet trains based on a high cost technology. We, who cannot even man our level crossings, dream of bullet trains whizzing past at 320 kmph in the countryside! It is like planning a brain surgery in a hospital which cannot maintain incubators!
Take education, so vital to the country's future. It is at abysmal levels, has become prohibitively expensive, teachers seldom attend classes in the rural areas and there is an alarming level of dropouts. The solution is round the corner: students will be given free tablets, computers and if need be, even iPhones! To further improve education in the state, the youth may be instigated to agitate for more IITs and IIMs, as if that alone will straighten the quality of education!!
How about our cities and towns? We need foolproof garbage management, reduction in congestion and pollution, a good public transport system, fire safety in public buildings and so on. Instead of such basic and doable improvements, what are we promised? Smart cities! What is a smart city? South Korea's Songdo is a smart city. It is being built at a cost of $35 billion and is slated to have sensors and computers placed in every building and road, to automatically adjust energy consumption. When we cannot even sweep our roads regularly, we want to fix sensors and computers in all our buildings and roads! Will we be fixing computers and sensors in our slums as well, where people live in sub-Saharan conditions? Or will we be shipping all such eyesores out of site, like they did at the time of the Asian and Commonwealth games? In both the cases, hawkers, beggars and vagabonds were willy-nilly pushed into trucks and sent out of Delhi, with a strict warning not to come back till the event was over!!
So you see, the magical akshtas are not a good substitute for sincerity of purpose and hard work. The wise old fuddy-duddies had better retire to their puja rooms and pray that saner counsel will prevail!! Pray that even if the youth has its head in the clouds, the policy makers have their feet firmly on the ground. Otherwise we will be consigned to Trishanku!
(The writer is a heritage and environmental activist and can be reached at ranisarma2010@gmail.com.