Nurses and Traffic Cops

Where would we be without nurses and traffic cops? And street cleaners, garbage collectors, electricity and water supply maintenance personnel or ‘linemen’ as they are known and so on.

This thought has been on my mind since the Nagaland Nurses went on strike recently to voice their grievances and press the government to remedy what they feel are certain injustices in the implementation of their service rules.     

These are the unglamorous and thankless jobs that go unnoticed. We know that the jobs are getting done but never give it any real thought and many times even mistreat the people doing them. We don’t think about what would happen if suddenly there's no one to do these jobs.

Let’s take nurses for instance. There would be no health care delivery to speak of without them. Sure, the doctors make the big ticket diagnoses, perform complicated surgeries and make the major patient care decisions. But if actual patient care is left to them, most patients probably wouldn’t survive.

Nurses are the ones on the frontlines of administering care and evaluating treatment. They are the ones who deal with the nitty-gritty of healthcare and even have better understanding of the complexities and implications of an illness than doctors. Good nurses also have exceptional people skills and thus provide invaluable emotional support to patients and their families. They are the human component in the healthcare delivery system, so to speak.

Nursing is such an indispensable and important job, and yet nurses are barely noticed or recognised. They are forever relegated to the shadows of the more well-known faces of healthcare – the doctors.

Then we have the traffic cops. Yes, our entire traffic control system is in disarray and the department is quite clearly not equipped to deal with the various traffic issues of the day. But it is not the fault of the personnel doing the job on the ground if the department is still functioning under an archaic setup and training protocol put in place decades ago when only countable vehicles chugged along our dusty roads.

Traffic cops are out there, come rain or shine, doing their job the best that they know how. Imagine what the situation would be like should these men and women stop doing what they do – keeping undisciplined and cocky drivers in check and thousands of vehicles moving under the most difficult conditions. And many times, while carrying out their duties and enforcing the rules, they are abused by drivers who feel they are being harassed just because they are asked to follow the rules.

The importance of the job that traffic cops do cannot be over emphasised, but nobody really notices them. They’re like inanimate decoration pieces we pass by dozens of times a day.

Nurses and traffic cops………….they do such vital jobs that we absolutely cannot live without and yet they are among the most neglected and undervalued.

Then there are the people who keep our streets and neighbourhoods clean. Day in, day out, they’re up before dawn clearing up our mess. They perform their duty diligently and do their part to keep our environment as clean as possible; it is us who do not know how to maintain the cleanliness. As our streets come alive with daybreak, the mess starts piling up again.  

Now, what about the ‘linemen’, especially those of the Power Department? Given the outdated infrastructure coupled with weak power sourcing situation in the State, breakdowns and outages are a frequent affair. These linemen are literally our power lifeline. At our beck and call throughout the day and better part of the night, they risk their lives constantly repairing these old and dangerous machineries just so that our homes and workplaces can stay powered and running.

There have been instances of power department maintenance men losing their lives in the line of duty, but such reports barely register with the public. Instead, they often bear the brunt of consumer frustration while their bosses remain untouchable in their comfortable air-conditioned homes and offices.

By the way, even as the job they do is critical to our quality of life, these linemen come under the ‘work-charged employees’ category of the State government, which means that they don’t have job security and no other allowances except their monthly fixed pay of a couple of thousand rupees or so which they don’t even get paid regularly.

Most of these jobs are considered lowly and insignificant. But think for a moment how important they actually are. The people who do them make life better for all of us, but get bare appreciation from us.

They, in fact, deserve all our thanks and appreciation. The work that they do directly contributes to our well being every single day.

Let’s learn to be good to the people who make our life good. Let’s give them our support when they need us. Let’s teach our children to be grateful to those who work tirelessly to make our lives easier and healthier.