TERRIBLE CITY WITH AMAZING MARKETING DEHRADUN

Mukesh Devrari

Dehradun is a nice place. It’s the capital of Uttarakhand. People living here are known for their honesty and valour and patriotism and their looks (mostly girls) and what not. Anyone who never lived in the city really takes it seriously. Sometimes people who visit Dehradun for short trips also creates this confusion. Although locals don’t find this description mesmerizing, as it just doesn’t match with their lived experience.

Maybe a few decades ago the city was about amazing weather, greenery, honesty, but nowadays it is more like any other place in the country full of drugs, petty crimes and unruly behaviour of all kinds. Still, it is much better than most of the other places because of its people, but in all other parameters, it is a horrible place. Dirty, overcrowded, polluted, unruly traffic, over-politicized and struggling in many other ways.  

Our city does not have adequate infrastructure. It has become a city of narrow lanes. The whole city has been sold in plots to hundreds of thousands of buyers in the last two decades. In the absence of rules, most of the inner lanes are of around twenty feet wide. Encroachment made the situation worse. Thousands of people have also encroached government land mostly on both sides of the river. Politicians supported this illegal encroachment as it’s a large vote bank.

In any case, it is our national character not to wake up in time. Just look at the traffic now. In the radius of 10 kilometres from Clock Tower, roads are unable to handle the traffic. Just visit through to Rispina Bridge to ISBT to Shimla Bypass to Selaqui once or towards any of the four exits from the city – Daat Kali, Nepali Farm, Premnagar Chowki or Mussorie during the peak hours, its same story everywhere narrow incomplete highways, encroachment and heavy traffic.

Underground electricity, sewer lines, 24-hour water and electricity supply, space of public parking, public health care system, regulated industrial hubs are still a distant dream. If you are government employee who lives within FRI or IIP or within the boundary walls of some other fancy institution of national importance created in Dehradun half a century ago, then it’s alright, but you are not then Doon is fast becoming hell hole. Xerox of the national capital region, where people are gasping for clean air to breathe.  

It’s an everyday struggle for children to struck in traffic while going and coming back from school. Parents also feel suffocated because of this. However, the govt. is more interested in selling the pipe dream of smart cities rather than doing something tangible to solve the problems in Dehradun. There is no place to take a walk. It is not even part of our imagination that people of all ages would like to take a walk, play and sit quietly sometimes. Maybe they would love to use cycles and our children would need a place to play. These important civil amenities contribute to improving the quality of life, money is not everything.

Dehradun is not even a reflection of what you see on Facebook and Twitter. They are just good photographs, the reality is not as rosy as it appears.

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