The Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) is intent on turning the clock back. In its annual budget presented on February 22, PMC announced an allocation of Rs.14 crore to provide free bicycles to 150,000 classes VII-X students enroled in the city’s 274 municipal schools. Under this scheme, 50,000 bicycles will be provided to selected students in the next academic year beginning June. “The allottees will be chosen on the basis of distance from home to school and their financial status,” says Arvind Shinde, chairman of the standing committee on secondary education in PMC.
This proposal has aroused consid-erable scepticism within the civic intelligentsia and the academic comm-unity in particular. Not least because a similar scheme was announced in August 2010 by the city’s mayor Mohan Singh Rajpal to citizens in a vain bid to reduce automobile and vehicular pollution which has reached tolerance threshold levels. According to the previous scheme, bicycles were to be made available at select spots in the city for citizens to pay-and-use with Rs.300 as deposit and Rs.200 for a smart card.
Under the scheme a user would be free to pick up a bicycle from designated locations and leave it at other specified spots after punching timings in the smart card. A nominal rent was payable after the first two hours of using the bicycle. For this scheme PMC had budgeted Rs.80 lakh for purchasing 2,000 bicycles. The fate of this scheme is unknown although Congress corporator Aba Bagul who devised the scheme says tenders have been invited for the purchase of bicycles and the scheme will soon see light of day.
The compulsion behind this overdue and desperate bid to increase bicycle usage is congestion of the city’s roads and alarming levels of vehicular pollution. While just two decades ago Pune was a pensioner’s paradise with traffic snarls an unknown phenomenon, over the past decade the number of automotive vehicles in the city has increased by a million with the number of two-wheelers plying on city roads rising by 750,000. Currently (March 2010), the vehicular population of Pune is officially estimated at 1.9 million, of which the number of motor-cycles/scooters is estimated at 1.41 million. Against this the number of automotive vehicles registered by the Regional Transport Office in 2001 was 900,000, of which the number of two-wheelers was 650,000.
“Rising demand for taxi-cabs from corporates, especially IT companies and call centres has increased the number of cabs and autorickshaws on city roads. Currently, over 14,000 taxis and 61,900 autorickshaws and over 450 school buses — apart from the 1,500 buses run by the Pune Mahanagar Parivahan Maham-andal Ltd are plying on Pune’s roads,” says a senior RTO official.
But Sujit Patwardhan, a city-based graphic designer by profession and founder-trustee of Parisar, an NGO dedicated to providing urban transport solutions, is sceptical about the success of the latest bicycle usage promotion initiative. “Even as it is promoting bicycle usage, instead of building walkways and dedicated cycle tracks, PMC is focused on widening roads, building flyovers and bridges for automobiles. This is a contradiction of the corporation’s stated intent,” says Patwardhan.
Although not strictly comparable, PMC could derive some useful pointers to make the bicycle usage scheme work from the success story of Ashta No Koi, a city-based NGO which has implemented a similar scheme in Shirur taluka, about 70 km from Pune. Under the scheme 600 bicycles have been provided to young girls to enable them to cycle to distant secondaries. “The reason we started this bicycle project was because most parents did not want to send their daughters to schools that were far away from their villages,” says Armene Modi, founder of the NGO.
Under the scheme, each loanee has to deposit Rs.150, which is refunded after completion of class X and return of the bicycle. “A girl child who has completed her primary education is apt to forget whatever she has learned once she gets married. Such women therefore lapse into illiteracy. But this does not happen if a girl studies at least up to class X, which is a condition the bicycle bank insists upon,” says Modi, who adds that every bike is sponsored by companies or individuals.
“Fortunately, a bicycle lasts for a long time,” she says. So does education.
Huned Contractor (Pune)