How to Be a Good Citizen

There is a streetlight near your house that stopped working around the time of the last World Cup.

You know the one.

Ask around about what a good citizen looks like and you will hear the big words: patriotism, sacrifice, respect for the flag. All fine, and all strangely unhelpful on a regular weekday, because none of them tell you what to do about that streetlight. And frankly, the streetlight is where most of us fail. Whatever good citizenship means in practice, it has to start somewhere around there.

The Constitution wrote its expectations down. Everyone remembers that it gives you Fundamental Rights. Fewer people remember it also carries a list of Fundamental Duties, added as Article 51A by the 42nd Amendment in 1976 (yes, that 42nd Amendment, the Emergency-era one, which is a whole other story), with one more duty joining the list in 2002.

Strip out the legal phrasing and the list asks you to:

• Abide by the Constitution and respect its institutions, the national flag and the anthem
• Cherish the ideals of the freedom struggle and uphold the unity and integrity of the country
• Promote harmony across religious, linguistic and regional lines, and reject practices that demean women
• Value the country's composite culture, and protect its forests, lakes, rivers and wildlife
• Develop a scientific temper, humanism and a spirit of inquiry and reform
• Safeguard public property and abjure violence
• Strive for excellence in whatever you do, and, if you are a parent, see that your child gets an education

Here is the odd part. Ignore most of these and nothing happens to you. No fine, no notice. Which sounds like sloppy drafting until you sit with it for a minute: you cannot legislate scientific temper into a person, or fine someone into cherishing the freedom struggle. So the list went in as a request rather than a rule. The rights chapters tell the state what it owes you. This one is the state, slightly awkwardly, telling you what it hopes you are like.

Now for the part nobody puts on a poster.

Pay your taxes fully and file them on time. Insist on a bill. Do not pay a bribe to shortcut a process, and do not offer one either. Follow traffic rules when there is no camera anywhere in sight. Stand in the queue, and defend it politely when someone tries to cut in. Segregate your waste and keep it off the street. In my experience people agree with this entire list and quietly assume it is meant for someone else, which is how a city ends up with everyone waiting for everyone.

Why bother when the next person doesn't? Because the whole arrangement runs on reciprocity. You pay honestly partly because you believe others are paying too. Each fudged return or jumped signal collects a small private gain and passes the cost to everyone else, in the form of a little less trust all round. Each time you follow the rule anyway, the norm holds a bit better. Slow, yes. But it adds up over years, which slogans never do.

Then there is reporting, where we are oddly shy. We are world-class at noticing problems (the open drain, the pothole the whole lane swerves around) and remarkably reluctant to file anything about them. We adjust instead. But a problem nobody has reported is, as far as the system is concerned, a problem that does not exist. No file, no complaint number. The moment you lodge it with your municipal corporation or your state's grievance portal (for the centre, there is CPGRAMS), it becomes a record someone is answerable for. And when what you need is information rather than action, the RTI Act of 2005 lets any citizen ask a public authority what it did with your file, and when.

The honest obstacle is friction. Working out which department owns your pothole is often harder than describing the pothole. That gap is exactly what MyAlly was built to close: you describe the issue once, it gets filed on the official channels (CPGRAMS, or RTI Online for information requests) with the right authority, and it stays tracked until an answer comes back. Whichever route you take, save the reference number and follow up once. Most complaints die of nobody asking twice.

General elections get the anthems and the ink-stained selfies. But the water in your tap, the garbage truck's timing, the state of your lane and that streetlight are all decided much closer to home, by your municipal corporation or council, or by the panchayat. Almost none of it is decided in Delhi.

Local body elections routinely pull thinner turnout than national ones, and that quietly favours whoever bothers to show up — the fewer the voters, the more each single vote weighs. Ward councillors have won on margins small enough that one apartment block deciding to vote, or deciding not to, could have settled the result.

So learn your ward number and your councillor's name (most of us can name the Prime Minister but not the councillor, which is odd, considering who actually fixes the drain). Where gram sabhas or ward committee meetings happen, go to one and watch. A parliamentary vote comes around once in five years regardless; it is the local one you have to remember to put in your calendar.

Article 51A was drafted decades before smartphones, yet two of its duties (promote harmony, develop a scientific temper) now get tested daily, mostly in family WhatsApp groups.

Digital citizenship is mostly restraint. Verify before you share, especially the claim that makes you angry or triumphant, because that is exactly the kind built to be forwarded before it is checked. Do not pass on rumours about communities. Same goes for miracle cures and conspiracy theories; the person who declines to forward one has done something genuinely civic, even if nobody claps for it. Argue with the idea, not with the other person's religion or region, and leave their family out of it entirely. If you run into actual cybercrime or financial fraud, report it through the official channels instead of only warning your own circle. And handle other people's data the way you would want yours handled, which means no sharing someone's photos or phone number without asking them first.

A concrete one for tonight: the next time a 'forward as received' lands in the family group, ask the sender a single question before it goes any further. Where is this from? Usually the thread goes quiet for a while, and then an aunt changes the subject to somebody's wedding.

अभी कोई टिप्पणी नहीं — बातचीत शुरू करें।