Dimapur’s wild roads: Policy innovation and policing competence needed

The streets of Dimapur have come to wear a mind—a darkly disturbed and dangerous mind. This mind would appear to be an accidental birth by a polygamous marriage of administrative incompetence, a bovine-headed public, and urban dysfunction.

Civilizing the city’s drivers now appears a colossal task that would require a three-pronged movement: public education, innovated governance, and infrastructural overhaul.

Every kilometre of road, each curve to a street, and every intersection to a crossroad in the commercial city of Nagaland now hides potential danger. The local media reports cases that primarily have high fatalities. For the average Dimapur citizen who spends his everyday on the roads, vehicular accidents are a common phenomenon though.

Indeed, it’s not by choice that the Naga are a sleepy tribal third-world whose brand of modernity is barely 50 years old. The Naga were still hustling bamboo in loincloths when they saw shoes and aeroplanes for the first time in their existence—that unflattering fact explains how modern wherewithal do not make the user a modern person. There has to be a foundation of education prior to knowledge being harnessed.

First, public authorities: A casual reflection on the factors that promote dysfunction can be combed from the roles both the government and the governed play. On the Christmas Eve of 2014, three persons were killed and several injured when a driver ploughed into a group of carollers near the suburban police station in Dimapur.

For news followers, the accident came close on the heels of several other high-profile accidents across the city. The tragedy could have forced the Dimapur authorities to strategize preventive peripherals through policy and policing to prevent future mishaps. (For instance, the administration could have introduced stringent mechanisms to contain drunken drivers, reckless driving; regulate speed zones and pedestrian zones; buttress existing infrastructure to protect pedestrians et al).

Such innovative administrative interventions remain too inspirational an idea. Seemingly ‘preventable’ accidents continue to happen. It is like the undeservingly-hyped CCTV camera facility for Dimapur to ‘check crime’—caught on camera but no law to prosecute criminals. Policy must carry the credentials of firm enforcement, both preventive and proactive.

Second, the public: It was just yesterday, September 6, that a senior citizen—yet again—lost his life to a speedster at Signal Basti. It might be one of the many pedestrian fatalities in Dimapur over the years that Dimapur’s drivers have incurred. Some of the fastest roads are fairly-decent roads such as the Chumukedima-Purana Bazar route, the City Tower-Duncan Basti road, the ADC court junction-Firing Range route, and the Dhobi Nullah to Signal route to name a few. The number of pedestrians, cyclists, and senior citizens falling prey to reckless drivers on these ‘fast’ roads continue to increase. There aren’t even pedestrian zones. They have become a people with no road to walk on.

Dimapur is not famous for being a traffic utopia. There are no rules: no lane-driving, no signalling, no spaced-overtaking, no slot-parking, no highway U-turns; no courtesy and driver-to-driver communication.

The behaviour is not entirely the fault of motorists—it is the lack of education in road etiquette. It would seem that almost every driver in the state learned how to drive unsupported by formal traffic schooling. Once a citizen had learned to drive, he can apply for driving license.

That is where the danger to life is—his school text books did not offer him lessons about basic knowledge sets of traffic rules when driving; if he had attended a drivers’ school, the institute certainly does not have a set piece on driving rules; his district authorities and enforcement departments have never undertaken community enforcement campaigns to educate him about the Do-and-Don’t of driving like a civilized citizen; he was not taught about what a driver must do when in single-lanes, when at cross-points, which signalling lights to use, when not to honk, when to overtake another vehicle, what speed to move when in city roads and residential roads etc.

Most of all, society’s institutions did not teach that respect and courtesy for other road users such as pedestrians, other drivers and their vehicles, and respect for the very road that he drives on.

The solution has years on its name. However, giving the state’s roads a semblance of civility cannot be impossible if policy-makers / enforcers and citizens meet at a point of willingness. For instance, policy-makers can devise innovative, fresh and creative policy interventions. They can create regulations suited to localized needs. They can design community campaigns and educational agencies that can educate drivers. But most of all, they must enforce them with grim firmness.

For the citizens, community leaderships, educators, and enlightened citizens would need to lead at the community level to reflect and to devise strategies to involve citizens i.e., schools and colleges, and council and wards to pressurize authorities to force changes at both policy and enforcement levels.

Such movements will take time but the road to civilizing Nagaland’s harsh streets might not be that difficult if only every official and citizen would actually commit a step to it.