Smart City? Guwahati?

Guwahati is one city in the country that holds several distinctions from the negative point of view. One, more than half the tax-payers are not served with piped drinking water. Two, the premier city of the entire Northeast – which the government often refers to as Gateway to Southeast Asia – does not have a sewerage system in place. Three, it is one city where the authorities have miserably failed to impose the laws against law-breakers. Four, it is full of people who badly lack in civic sense. The list can go on. On Thursday, readers of this newspaper had seen the lead or main story on the front page, which talks about the Guwahati Smart City Ltd (GSCL) working on an ambitious scheme of installing over 6,000 CCTV cameras fitted with high-resolution and high-technology lenses in order to monitor the entire city and keep a tab on criminals and traffic-rule breakers. The scheme, which is worth Rs 607 crore, and will engage at least 50 persons who will be monitoring the city through these 6000-plus CCTV cameras twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Sources in Guwahati Smart City Ltd (GSCL) have also claimed that the state-of-the-art CCTV cameras and related equipment will have virtues like recording and producing clear footages any given moment, besides having the capability to segregate video clippings related occurrences of crimes and incidents. What is however a matter of serious concern, as has been also pointed out in the said front-page lead story is that at the moment – yes, at the moment when the city is getting into a festive mood on the occasion of Durga Puja – more than one-third of the existing 290 CCTV cameras that were installed a few years ago at 91 particular locations around the city are not functioning at all. Moreover, since the existing 290 CCTV cameras and related equipotent are of low resolution, these have been hardly helpful in detecting crimes and criminals, not to speak of apprehending them real-time by way of monitoring through the CCTV network. This is enough to understand how serious this government has been in the past three years or more despite Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal very often chanting the mantra of transforming Guwahati into the Sports Capital of India and whatnot. The police, however, must be complemented for being able to detect crimes and criminals in their own ingenues manner, if not in a primitive mechanism, despite such a sorry state of affairs. Guwahati, one of the oldest cities of the country, meanwhile has earned the notoriety for having one of the highest crime rates against women and girls in the entire country. Images of that incident in which a young woman was molested in the heart of Guwahati a few years ago continue to remain fresh in the memory of people not just in the city but across the country. Guwahati in fact fares very poorly in the global campaign to eliminate gender-based violence and discrimination. A number of city buses exclusively for use of women commuters, introduced about five years ago have simply disappeared into thin air. Harassment of women and girls inside city buses has become common feature in Guwahati, with commuters irrespective of sex also often complaining of the kind of abusive and filthy language city bus conductors and drivers use in the presence of women and children. What citizens and tax-payers are probably now wondering – after learning about the Rs 607-crore project for installing 6000-plus CCTV cameras – is that why authorities are also not bothered about pedestrians. While zebra crossings or pedestrian crossings are practically non-existent in Guwahati, footpaths and pavements are simply unsafe. What Guwahati Smart City Ltd (GSCL) officials should probably first do is to take a walk on footpaths and pavements and find for themselves how unsmart these are, and then cross roads on foot at various traffic junctions without being knocked down by speeding two-wheelers and unruly drivers and owners of four-wheelers. Guwahati is far from becoming a smart city. And the open kutcha latrines along the railway line from Bamunimaidam to Narengi, and along the National Highway from Nine Mile to Khanapara are enough to prove this true.

Also Read: Durga Puja: Eco-friendly Puja Pandal In Guwahati