Whither pro-poor policies?
Saturday, 13 November 2010
THE Communication Minister, as the report said, has set a deadline to make the road sides free from hawkers after the Eid-ul-Azha festival. Hawkers, it seems, have been given a reprieve for a month due to Eid. Intention of similar plans to banish rickshaws from all main roads of the city have been also planned.
Questions cannot help but arise in this connections how such plans could be conceived in the first place. Everybody realizes that pedestrians in the sidewalks or pavements must not be too harassed by the activities of hawkers and the road spaces for easy movement must also be freed for easing traffic congestion. Banning rickshaw movement on roads can also play a part in easing traffic congestion. But these plans need not be carried out at one go or drastically. In that case, more problems will be created than what would be attempted for solving.
Government should seek to implement such plans only in phases after creating alternatives. It cannot implement its plans of streamlining the city by hitting below the belt a sizeable number its residents who have an existence below the poverty line. Hawkers, dependents in their families and the producers of the small merchandise they peddle, number millions of people. A great number of people, thus, will face peril in earning their livelihood from the move. The non-affluent people, who make a good bargain from buying the goods of the road-side hawkers cheaply, would also be inconvenienced. Similarly, the rickshaw pullers and the dependents in their families, plus the ones who make rickshaws or service them, would too be confronted with a threat to their means of survival if the plan of making roads free from rickshaws is carried out in swift surgical type actions.
Not only the earning of a living by these people would be at stake, such moves would almost surely deal a serious blow to the state of peaceful living in the city and relations between different classes of its people. The millions of the poor to be hurt, they would almost surely burst into anger. The angry mood of such people on being deprived of their means of sustenance could lead to serious agitation, violence and disorders on a large scale.
It would be wiser for government not to go for such drastic measures, all in one-go. It should proceed with its plans in a limited manner and in long drawn-out phases without disrupting lives and living sources of people at the margins of existence abruptly and extensively.
Questions cannot help but arise in this connections how such plans could be conceived in the first place. Everybody realizes that pedestrians in the sidewalks or pavements must not be too harassed by the activities of hawkers and the road spaces for easy movement must also be freed for easing traffic congestion. Banning rickshaw movement on roads can also play a part in easing traffic congestion. But these plans need not be carried out at one go or drastically. In that case, more problems will be created than what would be attempted for solving.
Government should seek to implement such plans only in phases after creating alternatives. It cannot implement its plans of streamlining the city by hitting below the belt a sizeable number its residents who have an existence below the poverty line. Hawkers, dependents in their families and the producers of the small merchandise they peddle, number millions of people. A great number of people, thus, will face peril in earning their livelihood from the move. The non-affluent people, who make a good bargain from buying the goods of the road-side hawkers cheaply, would also be inconvenienced. Similarly, the rickshaw pullers and the dependents in their families, plus the ones who make rickshaws or service them, would too be confronted with a threat to their means of survival if the plan of making roads free from rickshaws is carried out in swift surgical type actions.
Not only the earning of a living by these people would be at stake, such moves would almost surely deal a serious blow to the state of peaceful living in the city and relations between different classes of its people. The millions of the poor to be hurt, they would almost surely burst into anger. The angry mood of such people on being deprived of their means of sustenance could lead to serious agitation, violence and disorders on a large scale.
It would be wiser for government not to go for such drastic measures, all in one-go. It should proceed with its plans in a limited manner and in long drawn-out phases without disrupting lives and living sources of people at the margins of existence abruptly and extensively.