Trafficking The Rules

Arshid Malik

People have complained about it, people have written about it, people talk about it, people are involved in it, people are disturbed by it, people are fatigued and depressed by it and for the administration it is not even an issue worth consideration. I am talking about the traffic pandemonium that reverberates like the heart of a six-month-old baby and “bothers” the average life of every common person in Kashmir. Traffic is a mess in Kashmir and it truly and absolutely reflects the pathetic state of affairs in the State as far as administration in general is concerned. All the “tall claims” of the current setup fall flat on the face when one comes face to face with merely one ground reality and that is the state of traffic management here. One fails to understand that despite receiving a jolt during the erstwhile elections where the ruling party as well as its coalition partner did not land on its feet and the fanfare that followed with the State Chief Minister tweeting around asking for feedback from people about the causations “of what exactly went wrong” and the subsequent face-lifting features that were introduced thereupon which again fell flat on the face, what is the administration eventually thinking. If they could not even introduce measures to manage traffic in the State what else would they be able to do for the common people, if they want to do anything at all, which I positively doubt; for I believe that the political elite of the State is content with the fact that Kashmiri people are not up in arms against them which we as a people have every reason and right to take up, keeping in consideration the generalized apathy of the government towards us people and its unwillingness to move ahead.

It is a scare, moving in a car or public transport towards city central, i.e., Jehangir Chowk, Lal Chowk, Dalgate, Poloview, M. A. Road, and as a matter of fact all roads that bind the city together like a huge colossus of earthenware. The people who are assigned the duty to manage the traffic are slumbering on their posts in case they are available at all, which in most cases they are not. Now the traffic mess is despite the installation and thereof successful operation of traffic signals on almost all major crossroads and streets in city Srinagar. The question arises, why should we the people of Kashmir bear this unnecessary and uncalled for obtrusion in our daily lives? Why should we be satisfied with the second-class treatment that the current administrative setup delivers to us? Why should we be content, if the establishment thinks that way, with what we are getting when we should be getting better in terms of service?

I guess I have written about this imperative subject at least ten times and I figure that I am a writer whose writings have almost no impact on the readers, which is of course an understatement. But I am sure that the ears of the administration in the Valley are too busy listening to the tinkering of their cell phones to lend some time to what I have been trying to say time and time again. Please, and please set this traffic mess right because as a common citizen and not as a prized writer which I am not I have every right to assert for my rights. The concussion which befalls at this conjecture is that the administration is an isolated entity which has nothing to do with the common people and their problems. The administration is a sardonically perfunctory amalgamation of heads that keep banging against each other all year round over piffling issues to dough acquired through doubtable means. It is a set out of the set of people who inhabit the valley of Kashmir and this is a contravention to rules and regulation. While the administration is meant to set right affairs concerning the common masses it is busy collapsing unto itself.

Now about the traffic mess for real. Why in the first place is there a mess when it comes to traffic? The state traffic police department is a huge repository of manpower, I do not have the exact figures to justify what I am writing but my sources tell me that the department is well-equipped apart from the fact that the number of vehicles plying the roads of Kashmir has increased over the years to an extent that the management becomes a bit tricky. As per the records of the Transport Commissioner Jammu and Kashmir the increase in the number of vehicles registered with the Transport Department witnessed a plunge of 10.34 per cent in 2009-10, 11.92 per cent in 2010-11 and 11.98 per cent in 2011-2012 which I guess is reasonably fair going by the pace of development of the country. I figure that increase in vehicular traffic is somehow directly proportional to the overall increase in the economic stability of a nation or a region and accordingly the agencies that manage traffic are supposed to grow which I do not see happening.

The truth of the matter is that the business of managing traffic is a sordid affair in Kashmir and the people who are meant to control and manipulate the smooth flow of traffic are only busy in plundering innocent or sometimes defaulting vehicle drivers over one pretext or the other. The main job that the traffic police attend to is ordering vehicles to a halt, which as a matter of course are mostly privately owned, and harassing them without paying any heed to the actual duty of ensuring road safety and traffic management.

There state of parking in Kashmir is so chaotic that coming from a well-organized region of say India say Chandigarh where traffic rules mean the most to the people who are meant to regulate it, one would go crazy. Vehicles are parked in the middle of the roads by people and the traffic police do almost nothing about it. Parking zones which are discreetly not meant to be parking zones are under full utilization and again the traffic police do not do anything about it. Some of the most plied roads in Srinagar city are more than half occupied by non-sense parking zones which one fails to understand are there at all. These illegitimate parking zones eat up more than half the plying space for traffic resulting in choking of traffic. Another affair that somehow concerns the general police department and the Srinagar Municipal Corporation is the encroachment of roads by street-vendors and all. Why are these people allowed to set shop on main roads when the roads are already narrow? Why doesn’t the administration do anything about it lest some part of it is involved in a nexus to bother the public at random while earning easy money out it?

It just doesn’t make sense, none of it does.

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