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FIFTH
COLUMN
The
Road Not Taken
Coming
years may show expressways rather than wider highways are what we need
By
Tavleen
Singh
In the past
two weeks I have been engaged in an interesting exchange with the Ministry
of Surface Transport. It was provoked by an article I wrote in this column
about the shame of India being one of the few countries left in the world
without modern, high-speed roads-expressways, autobahns, motorways, whatever
you like to call them. It is my view that we will remain a Third World
country until we have modern roads so it is a subject I return to often.
This time it evoked an immediate response from the ministry. A letter
arrived from their public-relations office informing me that I had got
my facts wrong. "While we appreciate her interest in the road sector,
we would like to point out that her statement is not factually correct."
It is always gratifying for humble columnists like me to find that the
words I spew out every week are not just disappearing into a hole in the
ozone layer so I promptly rang the ministry to assure them that if my
facts were wrong I would correct them.
 How
many kilometres of modern expressways have so far been built? Where are
these new roads? When can we expect to start using them? My questions
evoked a nervous laugh from the ministry's spokesman who said in obsequious
tones that he was not trying to challenge what I had written but merely
trying to point out that roads were being built. Had I not heard of the
Golden Quadrilateral? The North-South and East-West corridors? These were
the prime minister's "dream project" and were already being
built. But, I interjected, surely these were not expressways, merely an
exercise in road widening? He would get back to me on this, the official
said, so I waited till the deadline for this column approached and then
rang the office of Union Surface Transport Minister Rajnath Singh. He
was gracious enough to personally return my call (unusual even in these
days of transparency) and when I asked why he was widening roads instead
of building new expressways, admitted frankly that it was because of "financial
constraints".
Widening
national highways will cost around Rs 4 crore a km, considerably less
than the estimated Rs 12-16 crore a km a new expressway would cost. The
National Highways Development Project will modernise 13,000 km of existing
roads at an estimated cost of Rs 54,000 crore. Work has already begun,
the minister said, and 588 km of the Golden Quadrilateral and 628 km of
the North-South and East-West corridors have already become four-lane
highways. The Golden Quadrilateral connects our four metropolitan cities
and should be ready by 2003, and the "corridors" will be ready
by 2009. The minister said he was taking a personal interest in ensuring
that the usual red tape that strangles most government projects was reduced
and that contract formalities were now being completed in 40 days instead
of 120-150 days.
This was
good news, I said, but did he not think it would have been wiser to build
expressways on routes that really needed them-Delhi-Mumbai, Mumbai-Chennai,
to mention only two-than waste our resources on widening 13,000 km? The
minister said they had considered building expressways but had dropped
the idea because experts projected that India would not need expressways
for at least another 10 years.
The minister
sounded sincere and certainly seems to be doing more than any other surface
transport minister in the past decade but he could be taking the wrong
road. If he checks, he will find that similar "experts" allowed
our cities to be destroyed because they did not expect so many people
to abandon their villages for them. City roads did not get built adequately
either because "experts" did not expect Indians to buy so many
cars. So, we are more than likely to find in five years that we desperately
need expressways and that we would have made the right decision if we
started building them now.
If we build
even one major expressway, with access limited to fast-moving traffic,
we could witness a whole new kind of progress. If the minister has doubts
all he needs to do is make a quick trip to Malaysia or China to find out
what a difference modern roads make.
He might
also find that there is much we can do to modernise our methods of building
roads. Malaysia built its expressway between Kuala Lumpur and Penang in
three years and China has managed to build all its expressways in less
than five years. So why should it take us 10 years to complete what is
only a massive exercise in road widening? An exercise that the minister
should still consider abandoning in favour of four expressways to connect
our major cities. Now, that would be a real dream project, one that would
put Atal Bihari Vajpayee's name right up there in history as the real
builder of modern India.
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CII’s
conference on Friday on corporate governance is called Independent Directors:
Why, How and Who. Why Not, How Not and Who Not, would have been better,
says INDIA TODAY Associate Editor, V Shankar Aiyar
