Parisar is glad to publish the results of a recently conducted study on the one-way scheme implemented by
PMC (and the Pune traffic police) on Jangli Maharaj (JM) and Fergusson College (FC) roads. The report critically analyzes the decision making process behind the scheme and the impacts of the scheme. It is further supported by interviews of different kinds of road users (such as pedestrians, cyclists, bus users and motorists) and other stakeholders such as local residents and commercial establishment owners.
The key findings of the report are as follows:
- By and large, the scheme appears to be a failure based on the citizen interviews conducted by Parisar. Most stakeholders think it has made things worse than before and even among the motorists (who were expected to benefit most from the scheme), opinion is divided.
- It exposes the fact that the scheme thus far has only provided infrastructure and facilities to help motorists, and has provided no support to other road users. This clearly goes against the spirit of sustainable transport and the goals of the National Urban Transport Policy formed by the Government of India.
- It also shows that though NGOs frequently interacted with PMC and police officials about this scheme, their inputs were by and large completely ignored. In other words, participatory and transparent governance was only talked about but actual implementation did not take their feedback into account.
- The report also brings out that the decision making process was rather ad-hoc since there were no clear objectives or goals that the scheme was expected to achieve, nor was any real measurement or analysis done to see if those goals were met, or to examine what were the other impacts of the scheme.
The full copy of the report can be downloaded from here.
The report received considerable media attention in Pune:
Times of India, Pune, 17th April 2010: main article
Times of India, Pune, 17th April 2010: supplement 1
Times of India, Pune, 17th April 2010: supplement 2
DNA, Pune, 17th April 2010: main article
DNA, Pune, 18th April 2010: main article
Indian Express, 17th April, 2010: article
Sakal (Marathi), 17th April, 2010: article
Sakal (Marathi), 19th April, 2010: editorial