13/08/2022
April 2022
It would take a moment to read. Not a big thing yet somewhere important. Would like to share.
The main street outside my apartment connects to Airoli & Rabale station. It's quite a busy road sometimes. Two adjacent Street lights were not functional for almost an year. Making it dark after the evening. Pitch dark on the footpath so can't use it and cars parked at the edges making it more dangerous after 7pm. I am using that road daily for an year now. Every time I passed the road i wondered "Why don't they fix it, is it that difficult ? Whose responsible if an accident occurs? Corporation or us? ". Months went by and finally decided to do something about it.
I had google. I started searching "who is responsible for maintaining street lights in NMMC (New Mumbai Municipal Corporation). I wish google answered to every simple and naive question we asked. After few mins of searching found a NMMC website which had a "grievance" tab. You guessed it right, site crashed after I clicked on it. On main page it had email address of commissioner of NMMC. That took me 5 mins. Wrote a mail with attached photos and my number that took 2 mins. My Maggie was ready. Sent the mail. Got a revert after few days. Commissioner forwarded it to city engineer. Nothing happened for 15 days. Pinged them again asking for an update that took a half minute. After a week they sent the authority to fix it. It is fixed now. That busy road is well lit 🔥 now. Not making this up but today I saw few pedestrians looking at the light and might be saying "it's fixed finally". No one is still using footpath, that's another discussion.
The reason for sharing this is sometimes we keep ignoring the things which might be done with not much of our energy. If our few mins with no efforts could fix something we should give a try. We can request/insist and get the work done from the Authority. Give it a try. Thanks to the commissioner, NMMC, gmail and google.