Uncivilised citizens

General belief

Today I attended a zoom session of a retd. IAS officer who is an ex-BBMP commissioner. (BBMP is the Municipal City council for Bangalore - a city with 1.2 crore population) and a city full of filth, corruption and inefficiency. He was introduced as an "urban" management expert. Most of the policies and practices he mentioned were, honestly, nothing new to us. He talked about simple and obvious processes like self assessment of property taxes, creation of specifications of work before awarding to contractors etc. Nothing he said was new to us from the corporate world. 

One point that he kept emphasizing throughout the session caught my attention and is the reason for this blog. He said citizens are equally responsible for the mess we are in today. He gave an example where a citizen purchased a flat that was built on illegal floors and when BBMP did not give Occupancy Certificate to the builder, the citizens, in connivance with the builder, offered hefty bribes to BBMP to get the OC. The ex commissioner feels the citizens must do their homework before committing to purchase such flats. There is partial truth in his statement but there is a larger "human behaviour" concept here that is in action, called the "broken window" concept. I will come to it in a while.

A second example the ex commissioner gave was that one day while he was on his regular morning walk he saw a well-to-do man walking his dog and the dog was defecating on the street. This man did not bother to collect the dog waste and just walked away with the dog. It is hardly a debate that this young man's indifference was unbecoming of a citizen - just like the previous example of the illegal flat.

Now, at this point usually people don't think further, and leave it here.  And this is what the ex bureaucrat also did. This is the general belief.

Root Cause

We will go to the root cause of this behaviour instead of just concluding on the more popular belief  that "It is the citizen who is equally responsible for the mess in urban management".

To understand my root cause we must first understand that a government or a corporation is a man-made "System" designed to work as a coherent entity. On the other hand "urban citizens" do not constitute a system. 

The parts of an urban population (or citizens) do not work together and may even work in opposite directions. The alignment of attitudes of people is a much slower process of evolution and may take decades, if not centuries. A system can fast-track a change in culture. It is not the other way around.

Consider this famous human psychological phenomenon known as the "broken window concept". The concept is most applicable in criminology but at a general level it applies to "law defying" citizens too. In short, it says that if a window of a house or parked car is broken, and left unrepaired for many days, the other windows will soon also be broken and the property or vehicle is vandalised soon. The underlying principle being:

"One unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing."

A classic application of the broken window example is the "littering paradox". Why do people litter more in already littered places?

“The presence of existing litter was strongly predictive of littering behavior. So if you’re in a place that’s already highly littered, you’re much more likely to litter than if you’re in a place that’s clean or free of litter.”

This is the broken-window concept in action.

Now coming back to our original question: Why do citizens break rules? The more pertinent question will be "When do citizens break rules?". They break rules when they find the environment is full of broken rules. 

Therefore, howsoever unintuitive it may feel, urban governments must:

• Clean up streets of any litter as quickly as possible - even if more littering happens soon after. The rate of littering will go down when people see clean street corners.
• Make officers accountable for violations. An officer who prevents one illegal construction prevents many more to happen in the neighbourhood.
• Make Road-signs and street markings so detailed that intentions become clear. This will eventually be the trigger for people.

Summary

As a summary, a 'systemic' improvement drives a cultural change - even for badly brought up population or hypocritical people. Systems change cultures much faster than cultures change systems. And governments are in a position to make systemic changes, not citizens.

And remember:  a citizen's lack of discipline is a symptom not a cause.

At the end I want to ask two teaser questions:

1.  Are the people in Singapore (or any developed urban city) born disciplined? 

2.  Why does the same Indian follow rules when he is a citizen in Singapore (or any developed country) ?