Saving Shillong: of leaking pipes, garbage and polluting trucks
By Sanjoy Hazarika
Over the past years, during regular visits to my home town, the most enjoyable part of the day have been the long walks on crisp mornings, heading out from my parental home in Motinagar, now Liewdemsoh, into the welcoming shade of the pine forest above the AG Staff Quarters where the ripple of bird song and the dappling light of the sun through the trees, the rush of wind and the rush of the stream take us to a different world. These tracts of green are a rich resource, providing the green lungs to a city swamped by uncontrolled vehicular pollution. Of the latter, later.
The ugliness of willful human waste, poor management and governance is acutely visible outside that world and even occasionally within it.
Almost every day without fail, I have noticed a series of leaks from the water supply pipes connecting the waterworks in the forest to the homes and community downhill. The size of the leaks have depended on a few variables, not least the weather – if it is rainy, then the leaks are more substantial, hissing like little serpents and gushing like small fountains. In the drier season, as now, the leaks are fewer but the water continues to hiss and seep out of badly joined pipelines: in a number of places, such as near the gate of the local forest beat office, it rushes out merrily while a few meters further up, it is curtailed by a desperate wrapping of PVC insulation tape; in other places, the water workers have not been that adroit: they have just used cloth.
The leaks have been virtually at the same place during these years. At times, I have counted more than a dozen, beginning within the forest itself where the pipes begin their descent to Motinagar, passing over a rushing stream and through thickets and pine trees, over glens and by the hill lane as it joins the tar-pitch road near the AG Quarter.
The point is not that the leaks are taking place; the issue is that neither the relevant government department, nor the local community leadership nor the many senior serving and retired bureaucrats (including engineers) have bothered to fix the problem. In the process, millions of gallons of water have just gone to waste, a resource that as all Shillongians and those who live in other urban centres in this country, is increasingly harder to come by. The attitude appears to be that we do not need to be bothered since the resource is so plentiful. The waste is not just of water but also of government resources which are the result of public taxation, among other things.
It is a reflection of similar problems which are visible in other parts of the city. But the water can and will dry up if our casual approach to such prolific waste does not change: the local community (through the Rangbah Shnong), the civil society groups, media and the city and state administration need to work together to ensure literally that such waste does not lead to taps running dry every summer. But the principal role must be that of the biggest stakeholder, the PHED which is responsible for the administration of water supply in the state.
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Let’s move to a second aspect of city life that needs urgent redeeming: garbage, especially plastic litter. This is not just a question of waste management but of public attitudes to it. When I walk to enter the realm of the forest, en route stretches of the road are littered with empty plastic food packets, cigarette stubs, “disposable” but very eco-unfriendly plates and glasses (from some binge) and even packets of rubbish. This makes a very strong and negative impression on visitors from outside. I have even found scraps of plastic and empty bottles of liquor inside the forest where I walk and I wish the Forest Department or the local Dorbar would place a few garbage bins just for this.
This is in sharp contrast to impressions of Gangtok. A visit last week to Sikkim’s capital left me and a number of senior academics from different parts of the country who had come for the first Academic Council meeting of the new Sikkim University amazed by its utter cleanliness. The State may not be the most rapidly developing part of the world but in terms of basic governance and people-friendly approaches, it appears to have few peers. I have traveled in Sikkim and even trekked there and found villages at 11,000 feet which have running water and electricity as well as mobile connectivity. There are cobbled footpaths connecting villages and homesteads. Even one or two of these services are hard to come by in large parts of urban and rural Assam, not even in Guwahati.
In Gangtok I looked hard for the ubiquitous plastic litter that flutters along the edges of roads and buildings everywhere in this country. Not one scrap on the roads, and the central MG Road is now a 24-hour bright and peppy pedestrian zone with music playing, restaurants, shops and hotels and a very friendly ambience. All the hotels are full as are the markets. I walked down to my hotel on a lonely hill slope well past 11 pm; it was a comfortable solitude.
Of course, there are blemishes — during walks through the town, I noted that some of the streams had visible and unhealthy loads of plastic garbage. In addition, the approach to Gangtok, a national highway that snakes across the lower Himalaya rising from the steamy plains of West Bengal, is one of the shabbiest and worst roads it has been my misfortune to travel on – in terms of traffic, broken stretches, sinking stretches and dust. We can complain bitterly about the Guwahati-Shillong road; but it’s still far better.
Yet, the friendly atmosphere of Gangtok is engaging because the people are open and welcoming, not just the hoteliers and tour operators or shop keepers; it is an approach that the rest of the North-east could learn from, instead of taking attitudes of constant confrontation and bandhs and strikes that are enough to scare people off. What we need is the “Sikkim brand” of hospitality and approach to cleanliness, certainly in public places.
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Finally, a few words on the skyline of the city and traffic of the city: Shillong has become a concrete jungle although there are still beautiful stretches in different parts where traffic is light and there is greenery. Yet, many residents appear to have gone after the construction of large, ugly cement houses and offices with a vengeance. Of course, these are easier to maintain than wooden houses that need constant tending. But the destruction of old mansions and bungalows and their replacement with cemented, soul-less monsters with little to recommend them is one of the city’s greatest tragedies.
The Chief Secretary, Mr. Ranjan Chatterjee, had mentioned to me the other day that the Government is planning to notify heritage homes/buildings where important Indians such as Rabindranath Tagore and Subhash Chandra Bose had stayed, however briefly, with a little notice on the building about their visit. That is good but one wishes the Government would go further – for example, in partnership with a forum of citizens for Shillong, Government could set up a Heritage Commission that could map the elegant older buildings of the city, notify those which could qualify for the heritage tag and develop a plan to preserve them, even provide some funds (through the National Urban Commission) to their owners for their upkeep and put a ban on the destruction of older buildings by new owners.
They are part of an architectural history that has given Shillong a special place, not just pieces of real estate. This could also provide a new “tour” for a city and region hungry for more tourists by developing even a walking tour of the heritage trail.
In different parts of the world, owners of such properties are required by law to preserve both the exterior and the interiors although they can change the wiring, plumbing and other services required of a modern home/building. Why can’t it be done here and other parts of the North-east?
But coming back to the point in the first para about traffic: Manas Chaudhuri made a succinct point at the release of the 6th State of the Environment Report by the Centre for Science and Environment at St. Edmund’s College the other day. He said that the Pollution Control Board exists in Shillong but is invisible and silent. It is time someone said that publicly: the thunderous goods trucks spewing bilious smoke as well as polluting smaller vehicles are a menace to the health of Shillong’s residents and especially its children. And there is no other city in the country that permits the passage of polluting trucks at all times of the day through the city, creating traffic snarls and health hazards.
Civil society organizations and the media, so quick to respond on “larger issues of public concern”, need to move on this urgently. The traffic police and the pollution control board need to crack down on polluters: Polluters Must Pay – that is one way of tackling this problem. That’s also the way we’re going to breathe fresh air again and walk safely on its streets, without fear of being knocked down.
Editorial for The Shillong Times on 29/10/08