A leading English daily that brings into public focus news and pictures of anomalies and sufferings about Dhaka city life has recently carried a picture where the footpath has been totally taken over by materials for private construction. The picture carried a question to Dhaka’s Mayor on who owns the footpath. A picture carried in The Independent recently showed cars parked at a “No Parking” zone, a very common sight on Dhaka’s overcrowded streets. When I moved to my apartment in Gulshan, I used to take pride in the fact that I could wake up in the morning seeing the sun rise without the hustle and bustle of cars and rickshaws that are the bane of residential life in most streets of Dhaka’s residential areas as the building east of my apartment was single storied.
I guess God Almighty must have disliked my silent pride and thought of teaching me a lesson. The owner of the single storied building decided to build a multi storied apartment on his plot. In the last three months, I have been waking up every morning to most horrendous noise machines can make and they continue late into the evening. There is no respite and the machines can be heard even on Fridays that should be a point that the labour organisations should note; that our workers do not have a weekly holiday or humane working hours! When I was returning home around mid-day on a Friday recently driving my car, I found workers from this site who have already taken over part of the road as theirs by dumping construction materials, straightening rods right in the centre of the road! I could not take that, got out of my car and asked the workers to take over the neighbourhood so we could pack and leave!
A few years ago, when I was Ambassador in Japan, a neighbour knocked at my door one morning. As I opened the door to meet him, he looked apologetic and made the traditional Japanese bow. He then explained that he would be re-constructing his house and that he had the legal permission to do so. I was curiously looking at him, trying to understand why then had he come to me. He set my curiosity to rest by explaining that as the construction would take a few months, he had come to personally seek my forgiveness for the discomfort that this would cause to me and my family!
The Japanese neighbour’s apology notwithstanding, there was no discomfort at all and had he not come to me, I would not even have known that there was a construction going on next door. In fact, during my stay in Japan, a multi-storied building was built on the same road on which I lived and that too was constructed with minimum dislocation or disadvantage to anyone. The reasons are worth noting because Tokyo is as congested a city as Dhaka and many of the city’s roads are narrower than in our city. Whenever there is a construction anywhere in the city, and there are just too many of these going on all the time, the builders are not allowed to use any part of city’s area for any purpose related to the construction. The builders are also required under the law to ensure that the neighbours are not subjected to any disadvantage because of their work. This they do by netting the area so that not even a small piece of construction material falls outside the construction site.
As for the horrendous noise of the machines that wakes me from sleep every day, only an uncivilised city can allow such machines to be used in any place where human beings live. To say that these machines cause noise pollution would be an understatement of huge proportion; the noise these machines make would wake up a person in a split second even if he is having a Rip Van Winkle type of sleep. The authorities who allow such machines inside city limits allow broad daylight murder!
Our city authorities allow such violations to take place as if these are in the fitness of things. The authorities would, I am sure raise their eyebrows if I would go to them and complain about the noises of the machines that wake me up every morning. The Mayor’s office I am sure must have just shrug aside with irritation the picture and the question on the footpath that appeared in the English daily. The traffic authorities who recently gave us their stunt they codenamed “operation clean street” must have simply looked at the picture in The Independent about parking where there is a “no parking” sign and must have said to themselves what is the big deal! On our part, we, as citizens, are the ones who are blocking footpaths with construction materials. We are the ones parking our cars illegally at “no parking” zones and making those horrendous noises by using machines that civilised people should not be using.
There is really nothing extraordinary in what the Japanese are doing in Tokyo. In fact, what they are doing is the only logical and legal thing to do; that they cannot make someone else suffer for their benefit. We can do the same in Dhaka only if we act as citizen should in any civilised city in the world. My neighbour next door who is making my morning sleep hell can very well use a muffler in his machines and stop making the horrendous noise. He can very well keep his construction materials inside his premise if he just wanted to do so. The same thing goes for the culprit who encroached on the footpath with building materials shown in the front page of the leading English daily with the caption for the Mayor. The driver who parked in the “no parking “zone is in clear violation of the law and the traffic police who was on duty at the time the picture was taken should be suspended for failure to do his duty. In fact, a major problem of Dhaka’s incorrigible traffic is caused by illegal parking in which many of us contribute like there is no law or law enforcer in our city!
Yet we are doing nothing. Those in charge to see these violations of the law are complacent about it that only encourages more and more people to commit these violations. The sad part about these violations that is gradually turning Dhaka into an unliveable city is the fact it would cost no one anything to do what the Japanese are doing in Tokyo. It is just a matter of mindset; that a citizen should not act in a manner that adversely affects the quality of life of a fellow citizen. Our citizens keep their construction materials on the footpath because they do not care how adversely it affects fellow citizens. If he cared, he could have easily kept the materials in the site where the construction is taking place. The same goes for the other violations as well; in fact for the many more that are committed every day about which we do nothing.
It will be futile to call the Mayor or any of the other authorities concerned for redress. When it comes to taking action, they all prefer to go into deep slumber. But this cannot go on for long because very soon, Dhaka’s sanity could break in the seams. It is time that we, the citizens, rise from our self-imposed amnesia towards Dhaka city life and take responsibility. If any of us is building a house, let him or her first ensure that the construction will not affect neighbours or if it does, let him/her minimise the effect instead of not caring at all as he/she does at present. Let us as citizens do the same in our other civic activities for these too will not cost us money. The only investment we would need to bring sanity into Dhaka life is a change in our mindset that we will not do anything as citizens for personal benefit that would harm fellow citizens.
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