Making people’s initiatives work

All too often, as movements get popular, they acquire stridency, bureaucracy, narrow-mindedness and lose that spontaneity that made them so attractive in the first place. The environmentalists of Mumbai, for instance, taught the rest of the country how people can get involved with the conservation, preservation and perhaps extension of nature within a city’s limits. And for years, it worked. Individual or small group efforts, for instance, led to the Colaba Woods retaining its greenery or to Cuffe Parade getting any trees at all. But in a few years, there was in-fighting, back-biting, allegations and rumours that some environmentalists were front men for certain business interests, specifically builders and developers. The early energy and enthusiasm and innocent freshness was lost for a cynical and strident posturing.

Today, the various environmental groups no longer see eye to eye and the animal activists have ‘issues’ — in the modern parlance — with green environmentalists, both of whom might have ‘issues’ with heritage conservationists while everyone takes on climate change environmentalists who might have problems with tribal rights activists and so on.

The saddest collapse is perhaps of the heritage conservation movement. This was not made up of well-meaning do-gooders but of trained professionals. Yet, in a short time, we have fallen into the trap of rival groups at loggerheads with each other. Every journey down Marine Drive makes it clear that a hapless government — and therefore relatively blameless here except for being too trusting — has spent crores of our money on a colossal disaster.

Since the beautification ended, the paved promenade has been dug at random to accommodate trees, which perhaps should never have been removed in the first place, and little garden-like enclosures. The strange bus stops, which provided protection from neither rain nor sun, have now been covered in what looks like tin sheets. The ghastly organ pipes in the middle of the road are beyond description.

Yet there are vast tracts of wasteland, where the heat of the concrete competes with the heat of the sun, even in winter! The entire effect is ugly and unsustainable. It almost seems like we’d been better off having left it to the PWD department. At least we’re used to their institutionalised lack of aesthetics. And they’re much cheaper to commission.

Somewhere, in spite of the well-meaning bases of all these movements, the ability to communicate was lost. Popular jargon includes idiotic words like synergy and holistic, but if only someone could get them to work. The sadder aspect is that everywhere, money — or the love of it — raises its ugly head and good intentions fly out of the window. In which case, the Batti Bandh youngsters have a lot of hard work ahead of them. They have the examples of their seniors and how and where they went wrong, so perhaps they can learn something there, horrifying as that may sound to them. It’s unlikely that human nature is going to get any better (all my friends are definitely going to be in hell, which leaves me with little choice), but maybe some of those management jargon theories actually make sense and are workable.

Of course, there’s also the problem of the rest of India — which includes the extended suburbs of Mumbai. They often wish the batti was on, so they can actually get the chance to voluntarily switch off.

Email: b_ranjona@dnaindia.net