Plastic bag bans and VIP visit disruption

The bandobast — complete with traffic restrictions, no-go (if not no-fly) zones and transportation shutdowns — for the visit of US President Barack Obama to New Delhi and Agra next week has obviously made many consider whether world leaders should cease travelling so much nowadays. Or whether, out of sympathy for the plight of the citizens of the host country, they should refrain from gallivanting around the cities that they do grace with their presence. As they happen to be among the most protected humans on the planet, the large amounts of manpower and materials that are pressed into service to ensure they make it to their meetings and photo-ops safely and in time, invariably means many others do not reach theirs in similar fettle.

How many are affected by the leaders’ peregrinations depends on the degree of sophistication achieved in managing security. In India, we are used to the idea that we should ban entire classes of things, rather than control their undesirable component. Plastic bags and vehicles without pollutionunder-control certificates, for example, are banned or penalised en masse, while the right thing to do would be to ensure recycling in the case of plastic and check for actual pollution levels, regardless of certification, in the case of cars. This same mindset and lack of capacity to manage complexity underlies large-scale disruption of life for ordinary folk when VIPs move around.