Monthly Archives: April 2014

Real or Not!

Guys, we have decided that we have had enough of serious blogs for now. Amidst all the hard work and toil happening at ChangeBhai, we believe we should keep a check on our sense of humour as well. So, here we go.

Check out our first series of Believe it or I-dont-care-if-you-dont :-) facts around one of the most popular issues handled by ChangeBhai i.e Potholes.

1. Pothole Speed Breakers:

fake potholes
Courtesy Pioneer Suspension

Apparently, these fake pothole stickers are used in Canada to deter people from speeding. No prizes for guessing why we don’t need these back in India. Hah!

2. Pothole Utility

Courtesy: twentytwowords
Courtesy: twentytwowords
Courtesy: Telegraph,UK
Courtesy: Telegraph,UK

pothole parlour

3. Pothole Art

By Artist Juliana Santacruz Herrera
By Artist Juliana Santacruz Herrera
Street art activism in Yekaterinburg, Russia
Street art activism in Yekaterinburg, Russia

 

By Artist Steve Wheen
By Artist Steve Wheen

4. Chilling Out Zones

Courtesy Telegraph, UK
Courtesy Telegraph, UK

chillout-1

@Authorities in India: Don’t be surprised if we start using these techniques to embarrass you. Not joking.

Blame the elections. What?!

“Greatest show on earth begins today” screams the headline in today’s TOI. All of you would agree with the fact that the buzz around the impending elections in our country this time is utterly deafening. As citizens of the largest democracy on earth, we mostly associate election time with something exciting, something to look forward to. A welcome change of guard. A new beginning.

elections
Photo Credit: EPA,SCMP

But, alas, under this whole media blitzkrieg, we could have never imagined the fact that the government machinery literally comes to a standstill around the election time.  Let me back my point with a live example from ChangeBhai’s database. Look at this Issue#A0269, “Road dug but not filled properly” uploaded by a Mumbai user and do read the comments uploaded by our back end team to get the context.

Click here to go to Issue#A0269, “Road dug but not filled properly”

It appears that, out of the 5 road engineers handling this area, 4 have been placed on election duty. The ‘helpless’ Head of the road department of this area has been requesting us to understand his situation. He, by the way, is on election duty himself from morning till 3 in the afternoon and they are supposed to keep their mobile phones off during this time.

It is insane how the Municipal Corporation employees could be stalled from discharging their regular functions in the name of elections. They are not in a position to carry out even the most basic function like the emergency maintenance work. We suggest that the over enthusiastic Legal luminaries as well as the Election Commission should find a solution to the problem of our government machinery being rendered almost dysfunctional at this time.

It would not be wrong to conclude that MCGM (Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai) is in an absolute state of limbo at the moment. Sad but true. Having said that, we, at ChangeBhai are not going to get bogged down with this and have doubled our follow up frequency owing to the elections. If there is no struggle, there is no progress.