Last month, our Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated a six-lane expressway – the Eastern Peripheral Expressway. This first-of-its-kind smart and green, 135-kilometre long expressway between Kundli and Palwal envisages signal-free connectivity between Ghaziabad,
Greater Noida, Faridabad and Palwal, providing a world-class experience for the road users.
With a permissible speed limit of up to 120 kilometres per hour, it also reduces the time taken for travelling, and will also reduce the fuel consumption. This expressway can also facilitate the movement of a large bulk of traffic – and thereby reduce the traffic congestion within the city. Great facilities such as auto-challans for speeding vehicles, intelligent highway traffic management system and video-incident detection system along the expressway are supposed to help commuters a lot.
But within 15 days of the inauguration, anti-social elements have started their stealing operations on this expressway. From solar panels to generators and lights installed on the expressway to batteries, items worth ₹4 crores have been stolen despite the presence of patrolling security teams. A number of solar panels have also been stolen, thereby greatly reducing the production of power and electricity, and increasing the costs even further, as they have to be replacement.
At a time when the government is trying to provide us better facilities for our development, there are some sick-minded people who are destroying, vandalising and stealing these properties, thereby proving themselves to be obstacles to the nation’s development.
This is not the first time this has happened. Last year, when the Tejas Express, a luxury high-speed train with many state of the art facilities began its operations, LCD screens were damaged, headphones were found missing, toilets were soiled and dirt was spread all over the lavatories. Fed up with these incidents, the Indian Railways has had to remove the LCD displays in the trains.
These incidents reveal the sick mentality of some people, while we continuously blame the government for the slow pace of development. On the other hand, the actions of a few people prove that we don’t deserve these developments – for instance, spitting gutka everywhere, throwing garbage at all places except the dustbin and then blaming the government for not maintaining the requisite levels of sanitation and cleanliness.
Despite all these offences, many of us don’t even want to pay our taxes on time. In fact, according to a report, only 1.7% of the 1.2 billion people paid their taxes in 2015-2016. But we never miss a chance to brag about the development in USA, Europe and other foreign countries.
Yes, our government has many problems, but we the citizens also have a fair share of our own issues. We want the government to do everything and provide us the best possible amenities. However, we need to understand our social responsibilities and start working on them. Spitting gutka, throwing garbage everywhere or vandalising public property will not help us get the desired changes.
India is changing – and we Indians also need to change. Our 132 crore-strong population is capable of doing wonders – and many a time, we have proved it. Every thing cannot be done by the government and we must acknowledge this to work together for a better tomorrow, instead of vandalising our own property and slowing down our development.
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