Race Course Road

India Today, December 21, 1998
Dec 21, 1998

RACE COURSE ROAD
The Road Ahead

Vajpayee ought to get a taste of the real India.

Prabhu Chawla

Dear Mr Prime Minister,

You will surely forgive me for this intrusion into your precious time. In May, I had written to you urging you to implement your own agenda through your own team. Instead you opted to be a captive prime minister. For eight months you adopted a please-all-offend-none policy. The result is the decisive drubbing from the same people who elected you in March.

You seem to have taken this defeat seriously. If what has appeared in the media is even partially correct, you have decided to take on the hydra-headed RSS, a defiant bureaucracy and belligerent allies. All long overdue. I also understand that you are concentrating your energies on giving a fillip to the development of infrastructure and have targeted development of roads as your single most important mission.

I need not tell you that in the past, several dream projects of previous prime ministers have fallen by the wayside thanks to an unresponsive bureaucracy. Or even plain sabotage. Some of your illustrious predecessors failed miserably because of their misplaced faith in the babus. One former prime minister told me in confidence that if he could, he would shoot most of the civil servants for their criminal connivance in keeping the nation underdeveloped. Let alone shoot them down, he could not even shuffle the pack. Needless to say, he lost the elections and the babus had the last laugh.

You recently confided to one of your trusted colleagues that you will not depend on clerks and engineers for your dream road and airport projects. That you will yourself monitor the progress on a weekly basis and beat babudom at its own game. It's a laudable goal, Mr Prime Minister. But for it to succeed, you will have to come out of the fortress that is South Block, take to the road and find for yourself the real state of our infrastructure. There is not a single road or an airport which qualifies as a symbol of excellence. While our international airports are aviation slums, the national highways are merely concrete and brick potholes leading to nowhere.

As prime minister, you have special aircraft at your disposal. But look around and you will see that chief ministers, ministers, even plain MPs prefer chartered aircraft as their mode of transport. They check in at VIP lounges and fly out of designated runways so they never get to see the real conditions of our airports. Abandon just for a week your Indian Air Force plane from the VVIP squadron and hit the road in your regulation white Ambassador. The bullet-proof glass will begin to rattle, the radial tyres will begin to wear out, the shock absorbers may even give away. Among other things, you will also discover how medieval our road construction technology is. In the developed world they take just a few weeks to construct a 10-mile long road; here it is more like five years.

This may sound like a very unconventional suggestion, but it should be enough to convince you how over-governed we are. There is only one effective prescription for the nation's speedy recovery and that's downsizing the government. To start with, you could abolish ministries like surface transport, civil aviation, urban development and rural reconstruction to loosen the vice-like grip of the bureaucracy. You have the option to choose between partial success and total failure. More than anyone else, you know that staying out of trouble is easier than getting out of it.

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