Shadows across the city landscape

Urban living has become hazardous. Apart from the stress of earning a livelihood, ensuring ones' access to civic infrastructure, finding schools and colleges for children, fighting loneliness, battling environmental issues and a score of seen and unseen interference in one's leisure times, it is all one BIG challenge. Human beings are not the only species who reside in a city. There are a whole lot of insects and animals who share the city spaces and interact with the humans without their leave or consent which poses essence of the city life challenge. It is also the reason that makes the city dwellers yearning for, 'those were the days in my village' when life was simpler and cleaner. It was possibly simpler, but cleaner - certainly not as the interaction with animals was closer and more frequent, and the consequential incidence of contracting a disease from animals was much greater.

The key to a disease-free life, if ever there has been one, is clean and hygienic personal habits practised in proximate surroundings. The atmosphere is generally full of hostile and potentially menacing organisms with almost multiple possibilities of access to human or animal bodies to trigger body malfunctions. The unseen viruses which keep mutating into different forms is a permanent menace to humans and animals alike. And populations that have close interaction with animals such as farmers, abattoir workers, shearers, knackery workers, vets are, hence, more vulnerable than those who have only a secondary contact with varieties of animal products. These disease agents cause zoonoses, the generic name for diseases contracted through interaction with animals. The principal cause of this vulnerability is ignorance of the populations and lack of regulatory protocols which are known to the people so that they can comply and equally, the municipal authorities so that they can enforce. As per the Indian Journal of Medical Research, historically human populations have experienced major epidemics of infectious diseases.

Small Pox wiped out the Aztec civilisation in 1520-21, and similar to smallpox, plague, a disease caused by bacteria and spread by rats eliminated a third of the European population over five years in the 14th century. It is well known now that human pathogens emerge and re-emerge due to an interaction of multiple complex factors between the host and the pathogen. Sure, vaccinations and treatments are concurrently happening, but infectious diseases still account for 26 per cent deaths worldwide annually. Again 30 per cent of the 1.49 billion disability-adjusted life years are lost annually due to them.

We, in India, regularly witness and suffer the outbreaks of emerging infectious diseases and most of them are of zoonotic origin, to quote the Indian Journal of Medical Research, again. Life in our cities is at constant risk of these communicable diseases. The sad part is that given the right awareness and vigorous public and personal hygiene, these disruptions of productive life are preventable. The onus of management of occurrence, treatment, and restoration is on the broken health care system. The city management is largely ignorant of their roles and responsibilities.

Last year's dengue and chikungunya epidemic in the capital of our country, saw buck-passing and blame games of sickening proportions. The municipal bodies were only anxious to shirk their responsibility. They successfully evaded public wrath, which should have been unforgiving, given their abysmal performance and petty politicking. Their ignorance of their responsibility is compounded by their total inability to understand and remedy the zoonotic dimension of the epidemics.

We have to bury this ivory-tower style of governance at all levels. "King in my domain" attitude has only made life difficult for the people of the land who have no choice but to create their own conveniences. No power supply, so will buy diesel generators. No water supply, so will bore tube wells. No waste collection, so will have it dumped on empty lands. No shelter, so will build slums. The people handle life as it comes and to hell with sustainability or conservation or preservation. But now survival is having a question mark on it. People have realised that survival with preventable debility or illness is not a divine pardon but a staggered death penalty.

The essential dimension of regulation is, first and foremost, awareness of transgressions and their causes. City management is not only about property taxes, water cess, or approval of building plans. It is really about securing human life, insulating human life from physical danger, disease risk, and user-friendly public spaces. The ecology for good health will have to cover good health of the animals, failing which, no environment will be habitable. "Swachh Bharat" needs to be a reality and not a photo-op, and the best place to start would be schools. The municipal governments must engage with the children of city schools and get them to embed the culture of a clean ecosystem for humans and animals equally. The starting line is a law which we all understand, and language is not a barrier, and the next line is that for the sake of humans, animals, too, and most definitely need health services.

The troubling question is that year after year, nothing really changes. This can only mean that the challenges of city management are beyond the capability of the current structures of a municipal body. The representation of the citizens in the governing set-up has really done nothing for the life of the city dwellers. Perhaps, it is time for CEO-led governance units for each colony, at least in metropolis size cities in our country. Our colonies, some of them for sure, are the size of small towns elsewhere in the world. If nothing else, a CEO managed colony will pin responsibility and demand accountability. It is worth a shot because the present system is not working, not for humans nor other living beings.