Title: India Moves To Get Out Of a Deep Rut
Author: John Lancaster
Publication: Washington Post
Date: Sept 15, 2002
URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18995-2002Sep14.html

Modern Highway System Seen As Fastest Way to Prosperity

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.

"They are asking for bribes, a huge amount, and we are trying to negotiate," said Ayub, 30, whose trucking company dispatched another vehicle to collect the remaining goats. "They don't say it's a fine. They just say, 'Give us this money, otherwise we won't clear it.' "

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 the Hindu holy city of 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 percent 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, among other sources, 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 intercity network, including one segment in northwestern India that features emergency telephones, monitoring 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, still largely in the planning stages, contractors will lay 4,536 miles of highway in a cross-shaped pattern across the breadth and length of the country, from Kashmir's Himalayas to the subcontinent's southern tip.

"If you study the United States 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."

The highway initiative does not mean that Indians will soon be whizzing around the countryside on limited-access, California-style freeways. In a country of a billion people, roughly two-thirds of whom still live in rural villages, drivers will still share the road with cows, pedestrians, bicycles and other nonmotorized traffic. Expansion joints on the new highways have been specially designed not to entrap cows' hooves, according to a project engineer.

The project also faces hurdles relating to land acquisition, poor coordination between state and federal bureaucracies and the presence of thousands of sensitive religious sites that must be moved to accommodate the wider roads. Contractors working on a section of road between Varanasi and Sasaram, which is part of the planned New Delhi-Calcutta corridor and runs through Bihar, India's poorest state, have faced an especially daunting set of obstacles, including a bombing by would-be extortionists and a recent state ban on quarrying that cut off their only source of gravel.

In light of such setbacks, few people familiar with the project expect the government to meet its December 2003 target for completing the Golden Quadrilateral. But Chris Hoban, the World Bank's operations adviser in New Delhi, praised the government for avoiding cost overruns and major delays, an achievement he described as "pretty astounding" given the complexities of the undertaking.

"This is basically upgrading a two-lane highway to four lanes or more -- divided highways with bypasses -- in one of the most crowded areas in the world," he said. "We give a great deal of credit to the National Highway Authority for having largely delivered on these very ambitious promises. Major infrastructure projects are not easy in India."

The relative speed of the project reflects its high-level sponsorship. Vajpayee, leader of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has described the new roads as central to his goals of uniting this vast and quarrelsome country and placing it on "the fast lane to socioeconomic development."

In a reflection of India's slowly liberalizing economy, the BJP-led government invited participation by foreign contractors, scrapped customs duties on road-construction equipment and instituted transparent bidding rules to limit opportunities for corruption.

Few would argue with the need to improve the national highways, whose capacity has been far outstripped by the country's population and economic growth. Since 1951, according to the World Bank, the number of motorized vehicles on India's roads (excluding two-wheelers) has increased more than 40-fold, from 300,000 to 12.5 million; during the same period, the national highways have little more than tripled in length.

One of the worst stretches runs from New Delhi to Calcutta along the path of the Grand Trunk Road, the storied subcontinental artery that was built by an Afghan conqueror, Sher Shah Suri, in the 16th century and later provided the colorful backdrop for Rudyard Kipling's novel "Kim."

The road is now a dangerous, traffic-choked mess, nowhere more than in Bihar, where the hazards include madly careering trucks and buses, wandering livestock, highway robbers and armed Maoist guerrillas, called Naxalites, who roam freely in the forest-covered Kaimur hills.

Driving through Bihar en route to Sasaram, a traveler in one of India's Ambassador sedans passed rice paddies, teeming villages and countless accidents, often involving overturned trucks whose drivers had been camping beside them for days. Traffic jams stretched for miles.

Late in the afternoon outside the town of Mohania, a truck hauling new Maruti automobiles partly blocked the road, its rear wheels mired in the mud along the shoulder. Abandoning all hope of movement, drivers had switched off their engines and were milling about the pavement, arguing about how to free the stuck vehicle.

"Just do it before the cops come," urged one driver, a bearded Sikh from Punjab. "Otherwise they'll create more problems for us. This is Bihar."

Buta Singh, a driver hauling steel from the state of Rajasthan, was more concerned about the onset of night. "If the police come they'll take some of our money, but if we stay here all night the robbers will take all of our money," he said, adding that he has been robbed "many times" along the same stretch of road.

A few miles away in Bhabua, the administrative capital of Bihar's Kaimur district, Police Superintendent J.S. Gangwar said he is aware that some of the men under his charge treat accidents as an opportunity to supplement their income. "Any form of corruption is deplorable," he said. "Part of the corruption is with the release of the vehicle. People pay money to speed up the process."

By all accounts, Bihar's dismal road conditions are directly linked to the desperate state of its people, whose per capita annual income of $82 is the lowest in India. Government officials and businessmen say they expect the new highway to provide a major boost to the area's struggling farm-based economy.

"I'm very excited," said Saurabh Rastogi, 28, as he stood outside his small rice mill, at the end of a dirt lane in the town of Kudra. A barefoot entrepreneur in Western-style slacks and round glasses, Rastogi trucks much of his rice to New Delhi, currently a trip of three to five days. He said he expects the new road to cut that journey to little more than a day.

"Everything will become quicker," said Rastogi, who employs 10 people and hopes to hire more. "Business will develop. Everything will become closer."

But the highway first has to be finished, and that is proving to be a challenge.

For several months this year, said a project official who spoke on condition of anonymity, carloads of men brandishing shotguns and bolt-action Springfield rifles paid regular visits to the roadside compound of South Korea-based LG Engineering & Construction Corp. and its Indian partner, which are building about 30 miles of the road.

The gunmen demanded protection money.

Not long after a bomb exploded outside the contractors' compound, skilled laborers began to quit, though the situation has improved since the federal government deployed paramilitary troops to protect the project, officials said.

The contractors recently ran into another roadblock when state officials, citing environmental concerns, shut down all the quarries in the state, cutting off the supply of gravel.

Government officials in Bihar and New Delhi said they are working to resolve the impasse, and both groups expressed confidence that construction would soon resume at a normal pace.

State officials have already begun plotting the development of Bihar's tourist potential in anticipation of the improved access.

One place they might start is Sasaram, where a majestic domed mausoleum rises five stories from the shimmering green waters of an artificial lake. It is the resting place of India's original road visionary, Sher Shah Suri.

© 2002 The Washington Post Company