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From: Regi P George <george_regi@yahoo.com Date: Sun Feb 20, 2005 6:27pm Subject: Polls bring rare democracy to Bihar's buses http://www.newkerala.com/news-daily/news/features.php? action=fullnews&id=68930 Polls bring rare democracy to Bihar's buses [India News]: Jalalpur (Bihar), Feb 6 : Now is the best time for the Bihar villager to take a bus ride - the only time he can choose a seat he wants without the pressure of caste, class, politics and economic status. With staggered assembly elections under way, this is the only time a landlord will deign to share seat with his workers - and that too, only if he is standing for polls and needs their vote. This is the only time when a upper caste Hindu will let a lower caste man sit on the front seats ahead of him - scared of the over-zealous political parties that suddenly enforce 'all men are born equal' rules before elections. The upper castes know what the parties know - that the bulk of votes are with the lower castes. After all, Bihar's ruling Rashtriya Janata Dal's main poll plank for years has been social justice. In normal times, say locals, the poor are shoved to the roof and left to cling on precariously. "Election time I get lots of window seats," said Heluva Ram, a 65-year-old farmer as he stood at a roadside in this rural hamlet in Saran district, around 50 km from the capital Patna. "Nowadays I don't get to the roof of buses. I am afraid I'll fall off and die," Ram told IANS. As author Arvind Das wrote in his path-breaking book on Bihar: "Riding a bus in Bihar is not a mere economic act; it is politics, no less. "From the moment the hapless passenger steps into the putrid puddles made by bus tracks in a bus depot, he is caught hold of and placed in his 'proper' social position," Das wrote in "The Republic of Bihar". Buses here are almost always bone-crushingly full, with people spilling from all sides like straw out of a vegetable basket. The bus service is erratic and eccentric at best, full-blown raving mad at worst. Even in Patna, there's barely a bus service worth its name and the inter-city service is scarily inefficient. There is no ticketing system and money paid depends usually on the ability of the passenger to haggle and the conductor's to coerce. More than a decade ago, Das had noted: "The Bihar State Road Transport Corp (has) one of the lowest fleet utilization and poorest customer service records in India". Clearly, little has changed since then. "There is no telling when the bus will come or go," said Ramesh Singh, a bus driver who, by his own confession, used to drive tractors in a farm just a month ago. "It all depends on which bus is available, if the repairs have been done, if there are enough parts to do the repairs. Often enough even I don't know about the buses that I drive." In 1953, when the Bihar Rajya Transport introduced government-owned blue and cream buses, many turned up just to see them. And even today, across great tracts of rural hinterland, many are still content to merely watch buses lumber by, convinced that the service is not for them - unless its poll time. "The rule is set," said Ashfaq Ali, a bus mechanic. "Elections mean first-come, first-serve." Indo-Asian News Service |
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February23, 2005 - [India Thinkers Net] North East news & meeting announcment >> |
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