We need to build social capital for a better quality of urban life
Five years after Bengaluru’s Church Street received a facelift, it is struggling with dumped garbage, broken pavements, damaged street lights, brazen illegal parking and inadequate maintenance in general. It has been painful to observe this deterioration right outside my office. At this point, you are perhaps rolling your eyes and saying “what’s new?", since we all know about the corruption in local government, incompetence of city authorities and the ‘lack of civic sense’ among our people.
You are right. This is not new. But if we are to have a better India to go with a richer India, we must grapple with the question of why is it that our public spaces are ugly, dirty, poorly maintained and generally deteriorating.
Else our efforts will be Sisyphean at best—a facelift here, an upgrade there, but always with regression to the shabby mean. My argument is that all the symptoms we can see—corruption, incompetence, inconsiderate behaviour—stem from the same deep cause in the Indian psyche. The lack of a sense of ‘us.’ Public toilets are dirty, public buildings ugly, roads choked, forests ravaged and the environment polluted because these are not seen as ‘our’ common property.
Rather, they are seen as freely available resources that ‘we’ had better exploit before ‘others’ do. There is very little social capital at the city-wide level. The lack of a sense of common community is the underlying reason why urban governance is in such a bad shape.
Indeed, the bigger the city, the worse the governance, with small groups of citizens trying to maximize their parochial gains instead of optimizing efforts for the city as a whole. We make parochial, private demands of our governments and democracy gives us what we really ask for. Elinor
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