Editorial: Looking at the big picture

For a long time now our governance is ridden with crises. Not just one, we are actually facing difficult times in many respects. And this is not the case only now, but has been so for many decades. All this has cumulatively resulted in  huge damage to the foundations of governance.

It is not so difficult to hammer home this point. Just have a cursory look at the things: slowed down, and faulty development will pop up. Even a lazy analysis of the approaches to development that have been adopted here make this point amply clear. In this all what appear in bold relief is that there is a brazen disregard towards long term thinking; this has  made us suffer in more than one way.

   

To understand it just take the example of traffic management. No one can say that the departments assigned with the task of maintaining and upgrading the roads, and those who take care of the traffic are doing nothing.  These people, particularly the filed staff, are doing their bit. Their work must be acknowledged.

But this is only one side of the picture. What we miss is a long term planning, and a matching action on the ground. What would be the status of our roads, say 10 or 20 years down the line; what kind of challenges would surface up; how will new forms of transportation, and expansions in our markets affect the whole thing; do we think this way? If we don’t how can we plan accordingly. The  result is that our problems pile up despite the departments trying hard to manage it all smoothly. One good thing to do would be to study any city that matches Srinagar, or Jammu, in population profile, road network, business activity, and the cartography of the commercial, residential and government infrastructure. We can make a scientific study of such a city, and then applying it to our long tern problems. By conducting a scientific of all this we can contribute a lot in making our future planning efficient.

The simple point is that are we interested in deflecting a problem for the time being or we want to brace to face it and solve it. If we want to solve problem we must have a big picture up and ready for reference each time we think about the problem.

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