18 March 2014, 10:45 AM IST
For the past few days I have been watching some steel benches reaching fruition on a road next to a park coming up as a cover for a storm-water natural pathway to an exit into the Jamuna that evolved into a sewage drain messing up the river over the last few decades in Defence Colony, the heart of posh South Delhi, where property values reach stratospheic heights. This is a photograph of the park as it looks today.
Defence Colony is what people call an "aspirational" address.
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Through the heart of Defence Colony, neatly disecting it into two parts, runs this now covered sewage drain. Thanks to being covered, what would get cleaned up naturally by seasonal changes, now lingers on forever. The stink that emerges from it can be sensed by satellites, it is said, even though it has been covered by this park.
The Environmental Green tribunal has, it appears, stopped covering up of any more open natural water-ways. Drains or otherwise. You don't want to see a photo of what this sewage drain looked like a few years ago.
In any other country or even in rural India, a flowing water-way would have been looked after, not just for environmental reasons but also as an opportunity to increase the sheer beauty of the surroundings. As a simple matter of fact, till the early '70s, that's what the storm-water drain as it flowed through Defence Colony was - a fairly evocative wonderland of all forms of flora and fauna.
The noise of the frogs alone, at night, was enough to drown out the sound of the railway engine whistles. The frogs have long since gone away, and the railway engine whistles can sometimes be heard, though only at night. The storm-water drain, meanwhile, became the sewage outlet for a large part of South Delhi and now even the stray dogs are scared to go in.
Because, amongst other denizens of the dark, the bandicoots there have become bigger than the stray dogs and the pedigreed home stay dogs are petrified of anything and everything on two or more legs anyways.
However, it is more about the lack of quality of workmanship as well as absence of pride of finish plus the more obvious potential for corruption even for something as simple as making and installing benches that stares us in the face, as tax-payer funds move towards being expended on something which is amazing coming as it does from the land of the most engineers in the world.
For a week or so before they were installed, a group of men sat on the roadside and welded these pieces of what appears to be untreated and scrap metal sheets towards making these benches, which are there for the world to see.
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So is it only about the authorities who are responsible, those faceless individuals who are known collectively as "government", part of the "system"?
I don't think so.
Not more than half a kilometre away from where the benches shown above have been installed runs the Delhi Metro. There, too, the authorities have installed four-seater benches of a similar design. I am, by law, not permitted to take photographs of those benches but here is a link to a photograph of the benches at the Delhi Metro platforms I found online.
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3pesIAU_-xas5-1Y3be21Q6zqkVdDICPOR8eSFgulGUHBK5mSamuwnBMyRRIz8R0fxxIr8995ujIc56ESGEK7oaVM8Ow31bgcU7PZ2j7zQZnR3Nx964g8wH7l51PVZ09_VEHl4T6P2f3O/s320/DSC07989.JPG
How does one reconcile to this vast difference? I am willing to wager a small sum of money that the bench at the Delhi Metro platform cost the tax-payer less than the bench in the gazebo over the drain. Yes, the stench is not just from below, from the drain.
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