Lawmakers and an Epic
Hyderabad: City police chief C V Anand has only the city denizens in mind when he talked about the action plan to improve the flow of traffic. He would follow ROPE (Removal of obstructive parking and encroachments) he said because of the increase in the number of vehicles on the roads since Covid times. If your public transport was in place and your pavements well paved why would people buy so many cars. Unless of course you were vulgarly rich, like many are in Hyderabad and those who need to commute to work.
ROPE is already in practice, when I saw a traffic truck standing near Himayat Nagar and removing all the small-time vendors who were selling lunch to hungry persons, for this kind of eating out is definitely easier on your pocket. And they selected 1.30 pm, peak lunch time to remove these people from the pavement.
There is a necessity to organise the traffic, especially since we are an unruly bunch and really do not respect any rules or regulations. But I do hope Anand ji knows that most people remember it is the end of the month because that is when the traffic cops are over-enthusiastically challenging people. Time for some pocket money for the cops too. It is a standard joke. Hey, don’t mistake me when I make light of this, for hats off to the traffic guys for handling all the jams and irritated car drivers, over smart bus drivers and so on…. Today in fact I saw another traffic lorry carrying steel boxes of one of these lunch guys…. I mean really? Aur koi nahi mila….
Take our CM’s residence for that matter. It is almost two kms from the road, deep inside (I exaggerate, but you know what I am saying) and yet; half of the main road on a thoroughfare is occupied by the barricades. In fact, I can swear that slowly they are occupying more and more space. Traffic jams are bound to occur at this junction for those who want to go on to the flyover and those wanting to take the left turn. And when there is a press conference, this place is full of press vehicles, because the CM’s house has no parking space. Get rid of those unnecessary barricades first.
Hyderabad ROPE is such a late thought. We built a Metro in the given space, we are building flyovers in the given space and all the Jubilee Hills, Banjara Hills and Prashashan Nagar occupants are extending their little gardens on to the single road, sloping little mounds so that parking is also difficult. Has Anand ji travelled on the inside lanes of Jubilee Hills to see how difficult it is to maneuvers on these roads because of the number of vehicles parked outside each of these bungalows? Yes, traffic has increased because everyone is buying bigger vehicles.
Why give permission to all those sari shops in the lanes of Jubilee Hills and the cafes and pubs in Banjara Hills and now say pubs should shut down their sound early in the night. Did the police not know that pubs are noisy and did the residents not realise that any public drinking space would be lively? Why did it take five to six years for them to realise all this? And now when you are getting all these investments and awards for Hyderabad being the best place to live in, you will stop the music from flowing?
I am not a bureaucrat and neither am I a lawmaker but this definitely smells of being a nexus between the rich and the richer. It is not that you only give the farmers some money. When you grow a city like Hyderabad and increase its radius almost two fold, please remember that there will be a huge population of the urban poor, for whom every day is a struggle. It is easy to remove them for they are unorganized and do not have a platform to voice their agonies, but they are also a voting population and maybe that will help these higher ups think more sympathetically.
But why take it out on the small time guy, who is feeding other small-time guys with a square meal. Only because you can, right? So, given a chance all the small time guys in Ameerpet will also be removed because they sell on the road? Your heart goes out to these guys who struggle day in and day out to barely eke out a living.