Spandan - Making a difference

After a lot of brainstorming and numerous planning sessions, finally it was the time when rubber hit the road.

26th August, 900 Hrs - Eight spandanites in white and blue gathered near the yerawada bridge for this much discussed event. Yes, they were there to tame the errant two-wheeler riders, teach the misbehaving four-wheeler drivers and enlighten the pedestrians. Alok and Sapna were the first to reach the venue, followed by Yogesh D. Soon Amruta, Avdhut, Yogesh P, Sameena and Tarun joined in. Avdhut distributed the posters (pinned to cardboards) to all of us. This time we had a limited stock of posters (one for Zebra crossing, another one for honking, one for giving way to Ambulance and one saying Keep Left). We soon realized that there were a few posters which were not very relevant. Also, we need to increase the font size. Oops!! I directly jumped into the lessons learnt. Bad project management!! Lessons learnt should be at the end of the project :-)

Anyways, this was the first time for all of us for such an activity. One realization that dawned upon us was that the sense of discipline among the commuters is not dependant upon the level of literacy. So called educated carwalas behaved the same way as not-so-read truckwalas. Rather in a few incidents truck drivers appeared to be more sensitive to the posters that we were holding. It was an effort intensive activity to convince people to follow some basic traffic rules. We had to literary stand on the zebra crossing and request (and at times force) people to stop behind the designated line. One incident sums this up. Avdhut was trying to persuade people to stand behind the line when one four-wheeler wala (I guess it was an Innova), almost ran Avdhut down. The driver was quite keen on not stopping behind the line but he had to surrender to Avdhut's grit and passion.
In another incident, a carwala got scared to death when Sameena gave a big thrashing.
There were some good responses as well with people raising their thumbs up to show their acknowledgement. This triggered me to think how thankless a job this traffic handling is for the traffic police. Hats off to their patience!!

After one hour of raising the posters, dancing with the posters and at time standing with the posters, we headed towards office with a resolve to come back.. next week, same day same time!!