The day had broken dull and grey, with an overcast sky,
when I got down at the Patna junction early one morning.
It was then that I saw men and women, with their brooms
out, sweeping Frazer Road and the main Bailey Road in
Bihar's capital as I came out of the station. The streets
looked spanking clean with an army of Patna Municipal
Corporation or PMC employees out on the streets.
Now, that was an unusual spectacle for me. For, like many
other city dwellers I, too, had reconciled to the fact
that PMC employees would be absent from the Patna streets
during Lalu-Rabri regime.
I had, of course, seen the PMC cleaning army when I had
come to Patna in the early 1980s to join the university
as a student. But the practice of cleaning the city virtually
became a thing of past during "Lalu raj" with
the employees frequently on strike due to non-payment
of salary or other reasons.
"This is what the Nitish Kumar government has done.
The work culture that had disappeared is getting back
slowly but steadily," said an old acquaintance and
retired IAS officer, who was on his way home from his
morning walk near Sanjay Gandhi Biological Park on Bailey
Road.
"Has the new government been paying salary to the
PMC employees regularly now?" I asked the officer,
wondering about the incentive that had finally inspired
the PMC to show some results.
"I don't know. It's for you to find out. What I know
is that the chief minister himself sits in office for
eight to 10 hours monitoring the functions of various
departments. The employees and workers now know that they
can't get away by shirking duty."
In fact, unlike Ranchi, the capital of Jharkhand, Patna
looks rather important and clean. The city recently got
the old and narrow Chiraiyatar overbridge replaced by
a broader flyover. And round-the-clock work is being done
to complete two more flyovers on the old Bypass Road and
Rajendra Nagar. The street light system on the 20 kilometre
Patna-Danapur Road is now functional. And there are traffic
personnel manning all the important roundabouts now. Ubiquitous
encroachments stifling traffic near the station and Hanuman
Temple, too, has been removed. The Gandhi Maidan that
serves as the venue for all major political, social and
cultural events has got a face lift.
Ranchi, too, had a similar look after the creation of
Jharkhand in 2000.
With Babulal Marandi taking over as the state's first-ever
chief minister, the capital got a face lift. The broad
VIP Road linking the city with the state Assembly and
Project Building came into existence and almost all important
city roads like Main Road, Kanke Road, Bariatu Road and
Ratu Road were broadened and repaired.
The state's citizens had heaved a sigh of relief with
the new government building and the repairing the state
roads that were in a horrible state during the united
Bihar days.
The Ranchi-Koderma, Ranchi-Jamshedpur and Ranchi-Chaibasa
Roads that had turned into a drivers' nightmare became
drivers' delight in the first couple of years.
But then the good beginning particularly in the context
of roads and other civic amenities could not last long
in Jharkhand. Political instability coupled with "loss
of work culture" followed. The state saw four chief
ministers being elected in six years. And work culture
deteriorated, while roads got from bad to worse.
Today, seldom can one see the Ranchi Municipal Corporation
employees sweeping the city streets in the mornings. In
fact, I got a bit perplexed to see some broom holders
sweeping Ranchi's Main Road at noon recently.
"Ranchi is getting back to what it was during the
Lalu-Rabri regime and Patna is experiencing a return to
its former glory," remarked Bihar's deputy chief
minister Sushil Kumar Modi in a lighter vein. "After
all, Jharkhand has got a government propped up by Lalu
Yadav, a synonym to lethargy and jungle raj," Modi
added.
But, I refuse to buy Modi's observation for I have watched
the deterioration of work culture striking Ranchi much
before - under National Democratic Alliance's rule itself.
