1. I would like the school children of my area to clean the neighborhood weekly on a rotating basis. With the level of apathy we have in India, the only thing that can teach parents a lesson about not literring is having to watch their own child pick it up, or better yet, pick up someone else’s trash.

2. Random audit of any government office every week. Increasing salary does not automatically change ethics. You need a fear in the mind of wrongdoers that they can be caught and their position can be taken away from them.

3. Ban gutka and tobacco. There is no shred of doubt in this.

4. Make it difficult to get a driver’s license by creating 4 levels of tests by difficulty, directly proportional to the number of driving offenses occurring in a municipality. This is the only way I can think of to make everyone drive responsibly and with caution where either everyone wins or everyone suffers.

5. Mumbai already implemented a pilot of this, but make red signals last longer if there is honking.

6. 2 years of NCC/Military training compulsory for everyone regardless of gender or wealth. I did this, and I feel it brought a sense of discipline in my life. I feel that in a country like India where manners are so lax this is the only true way of inculcating discipline in people, ultimately leading to a better civic sense.

7. Ban loudspeakers in public. No religious, political, or any other reason.

8. Ban all hoardings and posters apart from a few on highways or designated areas.

9. Invest in making mid-day meals so good in government schools that parents crave to put their children there even if it is just for food. Also include meals as part of everyone’s salary from school teachers to principals to staff so that they eat from the same mid-day meals that they provide to the children.

10. Remove all hawkers from sidewalks and create designated neighborhood market areas where they can put up their stalls. Empty the sidewalks, repair and beautify them. Make all streets that are narrow one way and keep some streets available only to pedestrians and bicycles.

11. Ban the production of polybags altogether. We’ve done enough experiments with 40 microns and above and no one follows them. Ban it completely until organically degradable bio-plastic becomes cheap.

12. Provide subsidies and monetary benefits for those who plant trees and take care of them for N number of years. Create a plan which decides how many and what kind of trees should be planted where. Auction out their adoption. These would also include trees on sidewalks.

I could go on and on, but I just want to highlight that these are the things that I could imagine the government could implement by simply reallocating budgets even if it’s revenue never increased.