FOR the Nagpurians, chaotic traffic and chaotic parking around the Main Railway Station is a commonplace experience -- no matter the arrangements the local authorities, including the Police, do to contain the mess. Over time, several plans and schemes have come up to organise the traffic flow and parking around the iconic Nagpur Railway Station with a building of stunning architectural beauty. Everytime some new arrangement is proposed, the authorities claim -- and Nagpurians dream -- that some day, the Nagpur Railway Station would assume a ‘world class’ stature. However, every such scheme, every such arrangement, every such hope has stood fully busted in the past some years. Anybody who moves around the Nagpur Railway Station -- on the western, Ganesh Tekadi side or the eastern Cotton Market and Santra Markets side -- realises that the mess around the Railway Station cannot be sorted out unless the authorities, including the Police, adopt a no-nonsense attitude towards the management of the traffic and parking activity. Unfortunately, that has never, never, never happened.

 

The autorickshaws are allowed to park anywhere. The taxies are allowed to park anywhere. The private vehicles, too, are allowed to park anywhere. And so there is an eternal mess around the station. Of course, there is a semblance of the authorities working diligently. For, every now and then, there is somebody in authority walking around shouting orders to clear up the mess. For a few minutes, there appears some order -- which vanishes in just a short while. Then, everything is back to NORMAL. It appears, the authorities expect that things would move on an auto-mode -- all by themselves once some discipline or its semblance is set. But that does not happen because the people of Nagpur just do not have the cultural maturity to follow the diktats of common sense and respect for others. So, they do things as they please -- unmindful of the basics of civic sense, unmindful of what is expected of good citizens. When the cops are around, then things appear to move smoothly -- at least for that while.

 

Once the cops are gone -- for whatever purpose and for whatever length of time -- people are back to their NORMAL selves of FREE citizens. So, no matter the occasional efforts of disciplining of the activity, the chaos continues as a matter of people’s birth-right to mess up parking and traffic. Of course, the problem is of space. There is no adequate space around the Main Railway Station. To make things worse, there is no appropriate and alert management of the space in which to organise parking as well as vehicular movement. But when space is inadequate, then its management must be done all the more astutely. The cops must remain present all the time, no matter the sun or rain, no matter the day or the night -- so that things are in order all the time. They -- the cops -- must not expect things to move smoothly on auto-mode. n