Roads to nowhere

November 1, 2006

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What is the National Highway Development Programme (NHDP)? As originally contemplated under the NDA government, there was the golden quadrilateral (Phase I) and the North-South and East-West corridors (Phase II). We had a deadline of December 2003 for Phase I and a deadline of December 2008 for Phase II. We are pretty close to December 2006 and Phase I is far from over.

Technically, 93 percent of Phase I is complete and if you drive down any stretch from Delhi to Mumbai, you get a flavour of what road connectivity has done to economic prosperity. But a corridor is meaningless unless all of it is complete and there are limited stretches along Mumbai-Chennai, Chennai-Kolkata and Delhi-Kolkata — especially the last — where we have no idea of when construction is going to be complete.

There is not much point to the PM talking about six-laning, if we can’t even get four-laning done. However, at least something has happened along Phase I.

Phase II, from Kanyakumari to Srinagar and Porbandar to Silchar, is close to disaster, except for the stretch from Delhi to Himachal. Technically, only 11.5 percent of this has been completed. Not only is December 2008 impossible as a deadline, we don’t know what the new deadline is.

While Phase I and Phase II are thus uncertain, the UPA government has gone ahead and added Phases III to VII, and some of these are still vague. In this context, let us not forget that almost every great civilisation — be it the Indus Valley or the ancients Romans — has emphasised roads.

In our obsession with NHDP and the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI), we often tend to ignore the fact that national highways account for a very small percentage of India’s roads (measured in km), even though they account for a significant share of passenger and freight traffic. We need feeder roads and these are state government subjects, sometimes local body responsibilities.

There are issues of building and maintaining roads and of financing them. If one tracks the evolution of road-building in relatively recent times, one finds that, till the end of the 19th century, road-building was fundamentally a local body (or state) subject.

In both Britain and the United States, classification of roads as a national public good happened in the late 19th century or early 20th century. In addition, till the 19th century, roads were often privately built. There are estimates from Britain that in the first half of the 19th century, 15 percent of the road network was privately built. There were toll roads. Roads were also financed through a corvee system, where people donated labour for road-building.

Advocates of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) should take note. As with other public goods, we now know that we can distinguish a financing function from a building function and there are unbundling possibilities.

Regardless of whether we are talking about a ‘capitalist’ or a ‘socialist’ economy, be it the United States, Western Europe or China, economic development has hinged on providing roads, electricity, education and health.

Of these, the last two are primarily private goods and substitution possibilities exist, even for the relatively poor. In other words, if public sector delivery is inadequate, for education and health, there are private options.

This is less true of roads and electricity. If one adds water to the list, the new public goods agenda is bijli, paani, sadak (bipasa). And, to repeat, the road agenda means not just NHDP, but also what is happening to the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY), Bharat Nirman and NREGA.

The relative failure and slackening of NHDP is symptomatic of why these will also not work, regardless of expenditure allocation. The litany of woes includes land acquisition problems, court intervention, forest and environmental clearances, bad and corrupt contractors with an ineffective penalty system, procedural complexities, and inter-departmental hassles. These are systemic problems and solutions shouldn’t become person-specific. Unfortunately, that’s not quite the way things work.

At least for the NHDP, I don’t think it originally took off because the then PM wanted it. It took off because of Major General Khanduri. That’s what differentiates the NDA’s success from the UPA’s failure. Regardless of pronouncements and hallowed intentions, roads are on no one’s agenda, regardless of the number of phases we contemplate.

Keeping in mind, the complexity of work involved in the high-density traffic corridor, we have mobilized additional resources – manpower, machinery and equipment and are working at a rapid pace to ensure that the traffic on the stretch is not disrupted and the work is completed at the earliest,” he further added.

The stretch from Bangalore to the Electronic City , which is a part of NH-7, is an important section of the National Highways network. It is a part of the Golden Quadrilateral & the North-South corridor of NHAI and provides access to the largest Biotechnological Complex in India , Biocon and to Narayan Hrudayalaya, the renowned Cardiac Hospital in South India , Infosys, Satyam, and Wipro et al and after completion will provide respite from the acute traffic congestion problem.