The rape of a 27-year-old woman by a Uber cab driver in Delhi, apparently a man with a history, has again ended up with our seeking bandaid responses rather than real cures. Real cures need commitment and stamina and a willingness to play for the long haul; bandaid is easy to offer as an instant solution so that we can all forget about it and get on with our lives.
The Home Minister seems to think a ban on radio cabs and catching the culprit brings his job to en end; others argue that bans don't work and, anyway, why should something be banned when customers were apparently happy with radio cabs, which gave them freedom from dependence on unreliable autos and wayward kaali-peeli cab services? Yet others suggest that putting a GPS system on every cab and strict checks on drivers’ antecedents are keys to a solution.
We should, of course, do many of these things, but we are committing two fundamental errors in assuming that a problem is being solved. Whatever we do, it is unlikely to make things more than marginally better for two simple reasons: the issue of women's safety is not only about cabs; and, two, no matter what rule you now impose or how good your regulatory efforts, the problem cannot be solved unless the community takes ownership of it. Providing safety may be the government's job, but it not only the government’s job. It is also the job of companies, NGOs and citizens themselves, among many other stakeholders.
Protests after the Delhi rape case. PTI image.
To deal summarily with the first point, let's assume that with tough policies and strong implementation we are able to make cab rides safer for women. But can we be sure women will be safer in other web-based transactions – leave alone at home or in police stations? Thousands of people buy and sell stuff on sites like OLX and Quikr. If you are selling your old sofa-set for a song, you will have unknown people walking into your living room to examine it. Who can guarantee that the people who come are genuine buyers and not men looking to take advantage of the next defenceless woman?
Uber, OLX and Quikr are all technology platforms, and technology platforms take almost no responsibility for things that go beyond bringing buyer and seller together. Uber can – if it tried honestly - vet, maybe, a few thousand drivers, but can the other e-business platforms guarantee the behaviours of millions of people it knows nothing about? Or will new laws say that all buyers from OLX will have to be accompanied by the police if they want to meet the seller at her home?
This brings me to the larger point I want to make: we can't really address any general problem, much less the problems of citizen safety, by adopting a culture of deniability and irresponsibility. We want power and wealth and profits and lower costs, but we also want to avoid responsibility for our choices at all costs. This applies as much to consumers as to producers, technology platforms, companies and their regulators.
Uber does not want to take responsibility for the safety of its customers and is happy to say it is just a platform provider. This is what accounts for its initial arrogant response to the rape, indicating that checking the driver's credentials was more the government's job than its own. It now transpires that it did not even take notice of a complaint filed by an earlier customer against the rapist driver. Its first response to the rape, that “safety is Uber’s highest priority,” thus rings hollow.
But it’s not just about Uber’s irresponsibility. The government too believes it job ends with catching the offender and banning this service or imposing strict new regulations on radio cab services that may end up crippling an important public transport service or make it prohibitively expensive.
The public wants to believe that safety is the government's job alone. But can a government, however dedicated and competent, protect every man, woman and child born within its territory all the time? Can civil society organisations believe that their job is merely to demand more from government and not do anything more useful and beneficial to society on its own?
Can parents leave the education and care of their children entirely to nannies, schools and coaching classes? Can governments just mandate schools to accept more students from the poorer sections (which is what the RTE is all about) and then ignore the 90 percent of schools it runs in the state sector? Some 10 percent of schools have to improve education when the 90 percent of schools directly under government control can't get the job done? How responsible is this?
Can companies think technology will provide all solutions, and that they have no responsibility for what happens to their customers and their employees beyond the usability of their technology?
Can ordinary citizens think they have only rights and very few responsibilities?
The culture of irresponsibility is now deeply embedded in society. Companies think they must work more with technology than employees in order to avoid labour laws or having to handle difficult "human" beings; banks don't want customers to come to their branches (they hope IVRs and ATMs will substitute for real people offering a hearing and coming up with real solutions); governments think their job is to legislate more and more unimplementable and/or draconian laws in response to public pressures for governance instead of educating people to help each other and also help them govern themselves; parents want to outsource parenting to schools and coaching classes…and so on.
The only point of consensus seems to be this: technology will solve the problems that we don't want to be responsible for as human beings. Of course, technology can help - and help it has. But every technology is limited by the human wisdom (or lack of it, as Uber proved) embedded in it and brings its own vulnerabilities.
Technology cannot be a substitute for responsibility.
The bottomline is this: all actors have to reimbibe the spirit of responsibility that goes beyond disclaimers and duties that you cannot legally shirk. The key is a realisation among all actors - citizens, government, corporations and civil service organisations - that rights cannot be enforced without a greater sense of responsibility in all of us.
No comments:
Post a Comment