We Blame People for Civic Sense, but the Government Gets a Free Pass

I’m sitting in a public bus right now in jaipur, and it’s honestly a disaster. The glass is so stained that it’s barely translucent. The floor has been "repaired" with iron sheets crudely nailed in place. The seats? Welded together, apparently to stop people from falling through broken sections. There's trash everywhere—on the floor, on the luggage racks, and it’s clear this filth hasn’t been cleaned in months. The air inside is thick with dust and decay.

And yet, if someone dares to point this out, the blame always falls on people’s civic sense. "People should keep public transport clean!" "People should respect public property!" But how can you respect something that's already neglected beyond recognition? This is the first bus of the morning ( 9am in morning ) —there’s no way passengers made this mess overnight. This is pure negligence by those responsible for maintenance.

We’ve made it easier to shame individuals than to hold the government accountable. It’s easier to say, "People litter too much," than to ask why basic cleaning and upkeep aren’t happening. We’re paying for these services—where is that money going?

At some point, we need to stop blaming "the people" for everything and start questioning the system that lets public infrastructure rot while shifting all the responsibility onto

And I learned that the hard way. I just got scratched by a filthy piece of bus scrap, narrowly avoiding a tetanus shot. Imagine if it were a deeper wound. These aren't just inconveniences; they’re safety hazards. If the government had done even basic maintenance, this wouldn’t be happening. Yet, instead of questioning this neglect, people online keep blaming the public for lacking civic sense.

Yes, civic sense is an issue—but it exists because the government never built a proper system in the first place. Take waste disposal. We have kachra gaadis, but they come at fixed times—usually 9 or 10 AM—when students and young professionals have already left for the day. Then they need to throw thier trash on the roads, married couples are the only ones who get to use kachra gadi. In Japan, there are common garbage collection points where people can dispose of trash anytime, and the system works. Here, all we get are schemes with no execution.

Blaming the public is the easy way out. The real problem is a government that doesn’t maintain what it builds and leaves people to deal with the consequences.