In a country where people can jaywalk into strangers’ living and bed rooms and get off the hook by feigning that they mistook it for their friends’, 200 rupee fine or classes will not deter jaywalkers. What we need is a draconian law.

But before embarking on any punitive journey, the traffic police need to first put their house in order. This is what they need to do. Most people who jaywalk do so while crossing the road. So, repaint existing zebras and add new ones with glow paint. For instance, the zebra stripes have faded in most places forcing us to hunt for them. Secondly, we have to search for zebras as they are located miles apart in most places.

Thirdly, zebras are located in the roundabouts and bends where buses and tippers come flying. So unless there are signs at every bend or roundabout asking drivers to stop or slow, look and go, these zebras will continue to inspire mortal fears among the pedestrians. Nobody in their sane mind save fools can muster courage to walk on zebras fearlessly. A few days ago a speeding jumbo that I was travelling in narrowly missed two young lads on the zebra outside the famous Patan Hospital.

Zebras are not effective without traffic lights. So the traffic must pile pressure on the concerned ministry to install as many lights as possible throughout the valley. In this day and age, when our life is controlled by technology, it is comic to watch listless cops in Thapathali and Singh Durbar directing traffic manually as if sweeping the floors.

Then the absence of footpaths on many, many roads including inner alleys and lanes and the loin-sized width of many of them, which also double as mobile shops, forces pedestrians to walk on the roads. Then not all Nepali pedestrians are Hercules.

There are visually impaired, physically handicapped, wheelchair travelers, old and aged for whom climbing the pedestrian bridge outside B&B hospital will be no less arduous than taking on Mt. Everest.

For most of these people just walking on the road is an achievement, jaywalking or not.

Manohar Shrestha, Kathmandu

Fine example

Sometime ago, I had been working in Kanyakumari district in Tamil Nadu, India. I as an English trainer was with a famous Christian school located in Kaliyakkavilai in Kanyakumari district, India. I was used to visiting many interesting places nearby.

Of course, all these areas like Kaliyakkavilai, Marthandam, Nagercoil and Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu, India are being inhabited mostly by Tamils and Keralites. The interesting fact is that I was always finding the roads and streets “spotless,” free of human waste. I mean 100 per cent sanitary conditions prevail in these areas like Marthandam and Kaliyakkavilai.

Even the kids or children are not allowed to defecate in the open. It is their inborn culture and their inherent habit that have developed all these good things on the hygienic front.

Senthil Saravana Durai, Mumbai