No significant change is expected.....

As a young lad growing up in Bangalore, I was an avid reader, eagerly absorbing every word I could find in print. Whether children's novels like Black Beauty or classics like Gone With The Wind, or my textbooks, or magazines, newspapers and periodicals, or my father's law books. My dad, being just as assiduous a fan of the printed word as I, subscribed to all the English-language daily newspapers available in Bangalore at the time: The Deccan Herald, The Indian Express and The Hindu. Of course, I read each from front to back, not omitting the ads or the classifieds. That habit has led to my reputation as the repository of useless facts and trivia.

One of the regular daily contents of each paper was the weather report, dutifully provided by the Weather Office of the Meteorological Department of what is now the Ministry of Earth Sciences. I was greatly interested in the weather conditions in various parts of this vast country, and eagerly tracked and compared the high and low temperatures and the rainfall in various parts of the country, developing a fondness for the cooler parts of our hot land. I read the Observations in The Deccan Herald's weather section, which was a recounting of the general weather yesterday in the state of Karnataka, or Mysore as it was known until 1973. I distinctly remember the one component of the weather report that absolutely never changed. It ran thus:
Outlook for subsequent two days: No significant change is expected over the State.

You could take that to the bank, you could depend on it when rumors of war swirled, you could count on it to cure you of your insomnia, you could rely on its assurance when various groups threatened to wreak violence across the state, you could take comfort in it when wayward satellites threatened to drop onto your head: no significant change was expected. It was the rock in our ever-threatening-to-change world. The Met assured us that no significant change was expected. It didn't matter that one day was sunny and bone-dry, and the next a thunderous, lightning-filled, hailstone-crashing flooding day. No significant change was expected.


A few years later, I left the country, but I returned periodically for various reasons. On every return visit, I would scan the newspapers as of old. Things were changing in India. Prime Ministers were being assassinated. Religion riots were creating schisms between neighbors and old friends. The country went broke, and pawned its gold. The old socialist mold was broken from sheer necessity, and a tentative capitalism instituted in its place. The West discovered that it needed India's proficiency in archaic legacy programming, and hundreds of thousands of English-speaking Indian programmers hit the jackpot of highly remunerative work overseas. India saw its first dollar billionaire. The word "Bangalored" made it into the English lexicon. India became the back-office to the world. Through it all the Met assured us, via its daily weather prognostication, that no significant change was expected over the state.

On this, my latest and longest visit to my formerly naturally air-conditioned hometown, I developed a bit more of a civic consciousness, a bit less detachment for what goes on in the governance of this erstwhile garden city. I think more about the cleanliness of the neighborhood, I consider the services being provided, I observe the gauntlet of corruption that Jayanth Q. Prasanna must run for everything from his motorcycle registration to buying a new flat. I note that the city administration, which goes by the acronym of BBMP(Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike, which means, as far as I can figure it, the Greater Bangalore City Administration, or something to that effect), has tremendously increased cash flow with all the new construction, business, permits, etc. So have the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board(BWSSB) and the Bangalore Electricity Supply Company(BESCOM). Not only that, they have made it extremely easy to pay them, with 24-hour kiosks, web payments, automatic deductions and such. They go so far as to say that they have world-class billing systems, and they are not far off the mark. They even charge near world-class prices. What isn't world class from these entities are the services they provide, which are as abysmal, if not more so, than what I remember from over 30 years ago.


First up, BWSSB. This eminently self-congratulatory utility(see their website) loses a full 50% of the 925 million litres per day that it claims to pump into the city, and it has no clue where that water goes. Indeed, I read a couple of weeks ago in The Deccan Herald that the BWSSB officials admit that they don't even have a complete map of how pipes feed off their water mains. That is to say, they don't know where the water goes unless the customer applies for a water meter. Add to that the dismal quality of the water that actually reaches the consumer(I mentioned this in another post) which requires secondary treatment at the consumer's home or business to be made fit for human consumption, the intermittent, uncertain and ultra-low-pressure supply, and one wonders at the accolades that BWSSB claims to have received. I truly believe that, back in 1975, we had better quality water at a decent pressure with greater delivery reliability.


Next, BESCOM. This power distribution utility, which seems to have been spun off from the Karnataka Electricity Board(KEB), inherited a wobbly, inefficient, unreliable system from its parent, and has remained true to its DNA. In the best of times, typically November through January, when the reservoirs are full and the rains are not shorting out the transformers at every sub-station, power failures may occur once a day, unless there is "scheduled maintenance", which gives you another period without power. Mercifully, the weather is relatively cool and very dry during this time, which means you don't really need a fan or an air-conditioner. But as the weather warms from February on, so do the transformers, and power outages become a regular, if unpredictable, occurrence. Approaching thunderstorms also apparently trigger pre-emptive shutoffs. I haven't been here during the monsoon time in many years, but if past experience is any guide, it only gets worse. But BESCOM too has instituted world-class billing practices, and it is quite easy to pay your bill. As for world-class service, it apparently values filial loyalty more, and continues the legacy of the KEB that Bangaloreans knew and disliked so much.


Now we come to BBMP, the successor to the Bangalore City Corporation. Like its corporate cousins, BBMP has instituted world-class billing and payment systems- no, I take that back. It has attempted to institute world-class billing and payment systems. It is certainly easier than of old to get your bills and to pay, but it is a bit short of being world-class. The reason I had to qualify my assessment is a personal experience with property tax. I would go into that a bit more, but I want to save space for other observations. Also like its corporate cousins, BBMP values family loyalty above all else, and has preserved the BCC tradition of doing as little as possible as late as possible as sloppily as possible. The only actual improvement I see in the city is the institution of door-to-door garbage collection, which has rid the neighborhoods of the unsightly and stinking concrete barrels where each street would dump their household refuse. Often, these were in front of someone's house, and I cannot imagine how that household got through each day without retching constantly. Now, of course, the less civic-minded of Bangalore's denizens, apparently unaware of BBMP's door-to-door collection and still seeing the old barrels in their mind's eye, seem to wander around with their plastic bags of trash, like bees laden with honey who return from the fields to find their home tragically missing, finally chucking them into empty lots, fenced-off electrical sub-stations, gaps in the sidewalks, storm drains, concrete highway barriers, construction sites and so on.


But back to ye BBMP. The idea that a city- and one that apparently aspires to be a world-class city- needs to have good roads, clean neighborhoods, walkable sidewalks, clean air and such, never appears to have disturbed its thinking. Bangalore used to be, in relative terms, a clean city. There actually existed, at one point, several roads without a single pothole. Now, potholes are de rigueur, storm drains overflow with sewage, sidewalks have giant gaps(or have been turned into garden extensions and parking spaces by homeowners), power lines and all manner of cables droop over the street and sometimes actually drape themselves on the sidewalks, trash is burned all over the place, construction material is permitted to spill onto the streets and the sidewalks, streets are being turned one-way rather than fixing the traffic-engineering problems, and there is little sense of governance.

 I watched a spot at the intersection of Old Madras Road and 80 Feet Road in Indiranagar, where there are traffic lights. On both the eastbound and westbound sides of OMR, as soon as the light turns green and the traffic starts to move, it is immediately brought to a crawl as vehicles negotiate the giant potholes. This causes even more traffic headaches, since traffic that is piling up behind cannot move, even though they have the green. The whole idea of traffic management is movement. Fixing this issue is, in any other country, or perhaps even in other Indian states, an overnight solution. You bring in a crew during the night, close down one side of the roadway, patch and roll the potholes in an hour, switch to the other side, repeat, and you're done. Traffic the next day would slide right through. But the BBMP says that even if they wanted to, they couldn't, because they have no money. If you don't have the money to fix potholes on major roads in several years, then surely you don't have the money to spend on unnecessary "improvements" which benefit the friends of city councillors?

Believe it or not, this was a light-traffic day, late on a Saturday afternoon. The potholes are behind the scooter stopped to the side. You can see the two-wheelers and smaller four-wheelers slow down and bounce over the potholes. And yes, it is that noisy!

So here's the situation: Bangalore is growing, but it isn't getting any better. We have water shortages, power shortages, potholed roads and horrendous pollution. The city looks like a war zone with missing sidewalk slabs, construction debris all over the place, haphazardly placed traffic barriers, trash everywhere you look, and a general appearance of decrepitude. So, what is the outlook for BBMP, BWSSB, BESCOM, BDA, et al, to get their act together and make Bangalore a livable, world-class city? In the immortal words of the Met Department: "No significant change is expected....."