Lifeline roads: Time to get out of narrow lane

VIEWPOINT

AMITABH SHUKLA

Last week, I was travelling and the brief holiday took me to Jaipur, Ajmer, Pushkar, Delhi and back to Chandigarh. While the journey from Chandigarh to Jaipur was by train, the rest was covered in the front seat of a Toyota Innova.

As I could not afford a nap fearing that the driver would become drowsy as well, I kept fighting waves of yawns and stared at the countryside -- marvelling at the landscape that changed every few kms. While the food remained the same, every subsequent roadside eatery made me come across a different language and dialect.

Hectic construction was on everywhere and only at a few stretches alongside the highway could one find paddy or mustard fields as the remaining space has been gobbled up by some commercial activity or earmarked for the purpose.

At one place, I found “child bear” being sold. Obviously the painter was barely English-savvy and meant “chilled beer”. Trucks, in front of my vehicle, however, took the cake when it came to slogans.

Most appeared like works of fledgling litterateurs who could not get their works published and, had rather taken to writing slogans on trucks as a career!

Himmat hai to aage nikal, warna bardasht kar (if you are brave enough, overtake me, otherwise tolerate me), warned one with his frightening slogan. My driver was brave enough and overtook the truck without any fuss.

Imagination ran wild in some of the slogans. I thought the owner of one of the trucks or its driver was using abusive language when the slogan at the back said, Teri Ma ki. But, in equally bold letters followed Jai Ho. So the entire slogan was Teri Ma ki jai ho. I had never come across such a slogan anywhere.

Another slogan said, Amiro ki zindagi biscuit aur cake par, driver ki zindagi clutch aur brake par. There were hundreds more. Tata phir milenge and buri nazar wale tera muh kala seemed to be written on a maximum number of them and sort of a national slogan of the big Indian beast that were the trucks with number plates identifying vehicles from far and wide including Orissa, West Bengal, Haryana, Rajasthan, Punjab to Gujarat, Maharashtra and Kerala.

One fuel station on NH-8 was giving a bathing soap free for every 100 litres of diesel and the limit was 400 litres. Half a dozen trucks and their drivers lazing around early morning in the vicinity of the fuel station indicated that the marketing strategy indeed worked.

But what perplexed me the most was the fact that the National Highways were perpetually under construction everywhere. At most of the places they were being six-laned. When I visited Jaipur from Delhi a year ago, a similar construction was on. When the new millennium dawned, 12 years ago and I went to Jaipur, the NHAI was four-laning the road.

Traffic on NH-8 which goes from Delhi to Mumbai through the commercial centres of Gujarat, was being diverted through slip lanes, sometimes making driving extremely difficult. At some places beyond Ajmer, there was barely a lane left for drivers as the remaining part was under construction.

I wondered whether construction and widening would be a permanent feature of the roads of the country. Not long back, these roads were four-laned, when Atal Bihari Vajpayee was the Prime Minister and gave a new thrust to road infrastructure in the country. Now it is being six-laned. Half a decade from now, the need would be felt for eight-laned roads and maybe 15-20 years from now, the volume of traffic would force the authorities to have 20-laned roads.

I don’t understand what prevents the authorities from constructing 12-lane roads straightway keeping in view the traffic scenario of 2025. It does not require rocket science technology to know that the number of vehicles on roads keep increasing everyday and they need space to move. I am sure after the six-laning of NH-8 is complete, no one knows the deadline, need would again be felt for eight-laning and then 10-laning. There would be construction activity going on all the time and we would hardly find a 200-250 km of expressway free from any construction or broadening activity.

The NH-1 is no better. Frequent travellers on this route from Delhi to Amritsar or Chandigarh would vouch for the fact that this road remains under construction most of the time. While the road from Delhi to Panipat has been six-laned, the road from there to Jalandhar is still under construction. Not surprisingly, there are diversions galore all the way. After the work is complete, more vehicles would be added and a need would be felt to widen the road further.

The Ambala-Zirakpur (Chandigarh) stretch was four-laned only recently and already a need is being felt to widen it with multi-storied housing complexes coming in the vicinity of the Capital and accompanying vehicles clogging the road. Balwant Singh, the taxi driver who drove me from Jaipur to Chandigarh and has been in this business for the last two decades, aptly said that he had never seen the Amritsar-Delhi or the Chandigarh-Delhi stretch free from construction.

Another highway which is always under construction is the Zirakpur-Parwanoo National Highway. Just after you cross Panchkula on the expressway, you have construction and diversion going on. At one place, construction is for the toll collection plaza, at other, road is being widened. Despite several promises and deadlines, the newly built four-lane road on the hills to Parwanoo is still not operational. Hopefully, the authorities would show some vision of looking at the traffic scenario 20 years from now and take appropriate action and not just knee-jerk reaction of broadening the road every 3-4 years. (19.2.2012)

(The writer is Senior Editor, The Pioneer, Chandigarh)

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