Tag Archives: Aamir khan

“Where is Teja?” & “When Will He Fix Our Roads?”

Three kids are arguing as to whose father is the fastest.

One says,
“My father is the fastest, he can overtake the arrow that he shoots with his bow.”

The second one,
“My father is even faster – when he hunts, he can shoot an animal with his gun and run up to the animal before it falls down.”

The third,

“You actually don’t understand what speed is. My father works in municipality. He finishes work at 4:30 pm, but he’s back home by 3:45 pm already.”

Jokes aside, let me begin the article with all due respect to the municipal authorities who have been going all out to resolve citizen complaints. Most of them do. And then there are the others. There is this super annoying thing which is incredibly common in the case of certain municipal corporations.

Frequent Employee Transfers.

Last time when we were so confused about ‘transfers’, we were watching Mr.Bajaj and Teja getting transferred in Andaz Apna Apna.

teja

For the uninitiated, ChangeBhai maintains an extensive employee database of all parties it works with. Needless to say, the database is updated frequently (weekly). Mostly, the moment a citizen issue comes in, we first forward it to the right ground level employee (junior-most) and then work our way up, if not resolved. But, one could have never speculated about the frequency with which the junior most employees are being transferred for certain cities. It is like the guy sitting on top is getting sadistic pleasure in doing so. No kidding. This does happen in India. Read about this case where MD of J&K’s Road Transport Corporation was frequently transferring class iv employees ‘just for a li’l fun’.

Refer to issue #A0561 “Road hasn’t been made for decades”. After visiting the issue site and being assured of resolving the issue by a certain Mr.Safif, nothing happens! Why? Because the gentleman got transferred without any hint or information about his replacement. Seriously, eh?

Now, one has to just wait to hear from the replacement while the road lies in tattered condition. Sheesh. We so wish the new guy comes in and identifies himself like Teja as soon as the confusion begins.

*drumbeats*

TEJA MAIN HOON. MARK IDHAR HAI.

 

Do you know where is this place?

The Background (Kahaani ke Peeche ki Soch):

I remember watching an episode of Satyamev Jayate where they focused on the conditions in which the police force works in our country. I can vividly recall a police wallah speaking about how common it was  for electricity board to disconnect the police station’s power supply for ‘no bill payment’ and how they used their ‘contacts’ to buy fuel for their official vehicles as insufficient funds were given to them for the same vis-à-vis the requirements.

It was an eye opener of sorts for sleepy heads like me who had tuned in to the ‘early’ morning popular program to catch their favorite superstar Aamir Khan talk about important issues. That episode indeed created a good amount of public exposure which should have ideally brought in a lot of police reforms. I hope that actually happened.

Now, of course, ChangeBhai doesn’t deal with law and order issues and hence this point doesn’t really apply to us directly. But, since, most of the issues that we handle and receive on ChangeBhai pertain to Municipal Authorities, we wanted to take your views on a similar topic.

The Context (Andar ki Baat):

In our endeavour to remain connected to the ground realities, we regularly speak to random people on the streets about the civic issues that they face on a daily basis and how effective their local management is. We had covered multiple cities before this and were pretty used to hearing negative things until we reached the Vashi – Belapur area in Navi Mumbai last week. We caught hold of people on the streets from different strata of society i.e the kaamwaali bais, autowallahs, students, housewives, office waalas and even beggars (who mostly didn’t give a damn to what we were talking about). Spoke to more than 100 odd people over the last 2 days in this belt alone.

Now, everybody (include those beggars too :-O) had only nice things to say about their area. This took us by surprise and we tried being specific with them by asking

‘kya baat kar rahe ho? koi bhi problem nahi hai idhar..kachra?..bad roads…??’

and they were like

‘nahi..woh sab Mumbai mein hai..idhar Navi Mumbai mein sab thik hai..thoda bahut toh chalta hai’.

They also mentioned that this has been a recent phenomena and their municipal corporation has really ‘pulled up their socks’.

We did not believe them entirely but of course we could get the feel that people here were generally happy with their municipal corporation’s performance.

While leaving, we took a photo of the spanking office building of New Mumbai Municipal Corporation (NMMC). Here it is:

Navi Mumbai Mahanagarpalika
Navi Mumbai Mahanagarpalika

As I drove by, I, in my head, started comparing this structure to the other bigger municipal corporations I have been visiting for meetings. Crowded dirty places full of files. No electricity. Cranky people all around. Shabby toilets. Dark passages. Computers that looked like they were from ‘prehistoric times’. (and am referring to the municipal corporations of big cities and towns by the way).

The Points Raised (Aapke vichaar):

Now, do you think municipal employees need reforms that should improve the conditions in which they work? Will that indirectly work in increasing their efficiency and creating our cities liveable? Or this is not related?

I don’t really have the answers to these questions. Do you?