Our people lack civic sense. Our people are careless, and heartless, too. Our people are irresponsible. We do not know how to take ownership of our shared wealth and spaces. And we are a lot pitifully ungrateful, venal and vastly vainglorious. We are, all in all, by much poorer for noble and more rarefied adjectives that indeed should define us.

Our gutters, roadsides and alleyways speak woefully of our carelessness and unthinking behaviours. Waste of kinds and kinds fill our drains. The choking conduits burst to unheroic fountain every time we get a little rain. Our parks, they are no better. Visitors leave behind their waste even as there are bins placed at the corners of the parks.

And the flowerbeds in the city. People just walk casually where flowers are growing. The trees panted by the roadsides get uprooted, chopped off or broken. Just recently, some miscreants had broken and uprooted the saplings planted along the road to Zilikha. In parts of Chanzamtog too, healthy saplings have been made a mess.

It is hard to understand why our people do this. What do they get out of it?

But then, it is clear that our people lack intellectual greenery which is why they cannot appreciate the idea of social greenery. Even awareness and education do not seem to help. How do we hold anyone accountable for such pitiful acts of violence and disruption? It is pathetic that people should make light of and not respect the effort that others put in to make our society a little cleaner, a little greener.

It is good news that the thromde is now planning to set up CCTV along the roads and in parts of the city. Work of setting up the cameras has already begun along the main roads of the city. This will greatly help us identify the people who go on destroying public property mindlessly.

As members of a community, it is incumbent on all of us need to take ownership of our shared wealth and spaces. Destruction of public property is a crime. And those found committing them should be punished.

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