1. Carpool for schools: What a quieter road would Rawdon Street and Loudon Street be if some of the educational worthies in and around the neighbourhood made parents sign a bond that they would carpool their kids to school and then installed an electronic camera to spot and fine bond-breakers Rs 50,000. Extend this to other schools. And to make commutes simpler, allocate school buses off the closest Metro stations to collect and drop students (kind of a ferry service).
2. Water recharging in golf clubs: A golf club is a water guzzler. Insist on water harvesting with periodic reporting or disclosure (audited) that is made public, ensuring that a golf club is not consuming a universal resource for private leisure on a net-net basis.
3 Enhance Rabindra Sarobar vigil: Every single club in Rabindra Sarobar has loaded multi-tonne ACs to cool their internal premises. At the cost of heating up the external environment (heat-island effect). Irony. You go to the Sarobar to cool off; what you get is the latent heat from some club where a tony collective is slouched in decadent splendour, expounding on the ills of the world in 18-degrees Centigrade.
4. Change school-admission criteria: Before admitting children in schools, the screening committee (if there is one) could ask for the CESC electricity bill. Families consuming more than ‘x’ units could run the risk of their wards not being admitted. If this is announced two years in advance, I can see concerned parents go on a ‘power diet’ (which may not warm tidings for CESC’s shareholders during quarterly performance calls).
5. Make car parking prohibitively expensive: Why should someone who parks in BBD Bag pay the same rate as someone who parks on Lake Temple Road? Radical suggestion: raise BBD Bag and downtown parking to Rs 200 per hour. Drop-and-scoot may replace immobilised full-day parking with the driver asleep in a fully reclined front seat. Treating our downtown parking like they do in Singapore or Hong Kong may clean up the city’s central business district or get office-owners to move to New Town.
6. Compost at the Sarobar: The leaf fall in Sarobar is landfilled or burnt. Shame. In fact, crime. The KMDA does not possess the people who can take on this responsibility. Why not get Agri-Horticulture Society involved on a professional retainership instead?
7. Book honkers: Empower citizens to video-record serial honkers. Especially those who seek to bully you off the road with incessant honking while breathing down your rear fender. Suggested penalty: two trips to the police station (‘Monday first-hour-ey aashbey’ when the offender turns up on Friday afternoon to report with driving licence in hand) and no permission to ply the bus in between. That sub-flyover section from Calcutta Club to La Martiniere for Girls might become like St. Paul’s after Sunday Mass.
8. Celebrate, celebrate, celebrate: Most environment improvement ideas are punitive; this one is not. Celebrate the Lake Road home with a burst of bougainvillaea with an Instagram post. Maybe even a letter from the CM. If there can be Shera Pujo awards in one month (October), why not a Shera Para across the year? Suggested categories: Best Flower Tray Hanging from the Balcony Award and Best Treelined Avenue Without Advertisements Nailed to Trees Award.
9. Get bureaucrats and ministers to reply: I write occasional letters to the CEO of KMDA asking for permission to do this, do that (all in environment interest). I never get a reply. The one CEO of KMDA who replied to every email or WhatsApp was Vivek Bharadwaj. No wonder the biggest transformation in Rabindra Sarobar happened in his tenure. He sucked common citizens into a public movement to liberate south Kolkata’s most precious public leisure jewel from decrepit anonymity.
10. Permit angling: This will get every environmentalist yelling for my blood group. My counter-argument: create vested interests whose interests are aligned with that of the environment. Sporting anglers don’t poach fish (as in ‘baari niye jaabo’); they fish to reinvest and vice versa; they invest in biodiversity; it is due to their interest that the fish population thrives; they will be the first to flag an alert if the COD or BOD of the Sarobar water begins to change.
11. Lapierre experiment: Get offices to sit without fans for an hour a week and announce it on social media (nobody does anything these days without a photo-op). The great writer would do so in memory of Pilkhana when writing in Paris.
12. Pool plastic waste: What if there were public waste collectors where you could drop all the beer bottles, Coke cans, Domino’s pizza boxes and plastic juice cups — without getting out of your car? That waste would not get into the jaws of the neighbourhood KMC compactor for unsympathetic landfilling.
13. No compactor: The KMC compactor is a great leveller. Devours and compacts the biodegradable with the NBD. Which is then landfilled. What could have been recycled ends up in the earth to live for another 300 years. Can this approach be rethought? Can the waste collectors and ragpickers be brought back into circulation?
14. Different Instagram kinds: How about Instagram posts on people who slashed their personal spending 40 per cent even as they paid 80 per cent higher taxes? How about posts on the affluent who take the Metro to work while the Mercedes idles at home? How about posts on people who sold their Mercedes (5 km/litre) and cycle to work instead?
15. Open ‘green’ doors: I am waiting for the day Alka Bangur opens her doors for a nature study tour of her garden? I am waiting for the day 80-year-old Asha Gupta is well enough to lead visitors through her jewel of a Ballygunge Park Road terrace garden. I am waiting for the day Lata Bajoria gets an award for an organic garden where she invites visitors to walk barefoot each winter.
16. Dress ‘dead’ trees: Why can’t supposedly dead trees in Rabindra Sarobar be dressed in creepers and money plants so that they may become green again, instead of being hacked and sold?
17. De-inventorise: Enough of gyaan. I intend to give away 30 clothing items before the month is out. I would be happier with less. If you see the bhelpuri-wallah across Menoka Cinema wearing a batik blue one of these weeks, you know where it may have come from.
18. Cycling lessons at the Sarobar: Use the empty Rabindra Sarobar after 9am to teach citizens how to cycle (without the dread of sneaking a lorry that could knock them over). What a property and how it has been hostaged by rowing and walker interests by excluding all other possibilities.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the website)
