SASARAM (India): In the hot afternoon sun, Mohammed Ayub perched on the side of his overturned truck, contemplating a steady stream of traffic — bicycles, bull carts, buses blaring Bollywood tunes — and his own dreary luck. He had been there for two days, ever since his big Tata diesel, swerving to avoid an oncoming bus, had toppled over with its load of 200 goats, many of which were promptly snatched by nearby villagers. Now he had a bigger problem: Police were demanding a bribe of about $340 before they would allow him to summon a wrecking vehicle and continue on his way.
Such scenes are common on India’s national highways, an antiquated, desperately overcrowded two-lane network with one of the world’s highest accident rates and a justly deserved reputation for lawlessness and corruption.
A recent two-day car journey over 70 miles of that network, between Varanasi and this grubby market town 340 miles southeast of New Delhi, offered a taste of the transportation miseries that Indians take for granted: bathtub- size potholes, grotesquely overloaded vehicles, threats of banditry, mind-numbing traffic jams, police shakedowns and a critical shortage of emergency vehicles such as tow trucks and ambulances.
But relief may finally be in sight. Eager to develop a transportation system worthy of its globalizing and increasingly information-driven economy, India is in the throes of a massive highway-building binge that government officials describe as the largest public works initiative since independence from Britain in 1947. The improvements won’t come a moment too soon. With traffic growing at between 8 and 10 per cent a year, India’s miserable highways are acting as a serious brake on development, inhibiting delivery not only of food, construction materials and other commercial goods but also of basic services such as health care and education, according to the World Bank.
A pet project of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the $12 billion, 10-year National Highway Development Plan is India’s version of the interstate highway initiative undertaken by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s. It aims to link the country’s major cities, ports and regions with 8,235 miles of mostly four-lane concrete highways by 2009 and will widen to six and occasionally eight lanes near some cities.
Funded by the World Bank and a new fuel tax the project’s first phase consists of a 3,698-mile “Golden Quadrilateral” running along existing corridors between New Delhi, Calcutta, Madras and Bombay. Foreign and Indian contractors have completed more than 600 miles of the network, including one segment in northwestern India that features emergency telephones, cameras and federal highway police — a nascent force of borrowed paramilitary troops that transportation officials hope will someday be expanded to the rest of the country. In the second and most ambitious phase contractors will lay 4,536 miles of highway in a cross-shaped pattern across the breadth and length of the country, from the Himalayas to the subcontinent’s southern tip.
“If you study the US or Europe, the main development of the country has started after the road network was developed,” said retired Maj. Gen. B.C. Khanduri, a former army engineer who heads India’s Ministry of Road Transport and Highways. “Not only do we need it to unite the country, but if you want faster development in a country like India, roads are absolutely necessary.”—Dawn/ LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post
