Eyes on the road and hands upon the wheel

 

Amitabh Shukla 

You cannot have a decent quality life anywhere in the country without quality roads: Whether you go to school or cycle to work, whether your trip is on the tractor to the local mandi or a long drive in a sleek car...

For a lot of fellow citizens, the vast expanse of black bitumen on roads, unbroken and serpentine stretches, with wide expanses of the countryside and the hills unfolding, sends the adrenaline pumping. Ask those who travel on many bitumen wonders or highways of the country and they will swear by the excitement driving on them has to offer.

Driving is not only a stress buster but also a learning experience. Nature, people, aspirations, food, culture, society, the economy… you name it. Being based in Chandigarh is of great help when planning a long drive due to its geographical advantage — it lies in the foothills of the Shivalik range and the great Indian plain ends here. The joint capital of Punjab and Haryana is perched on the edge of the vast expanse of the Indo-Gangetic belt, the mainstay of Indian agriculture since the Indus Valley Civilization. So, one has the best of both geographical worlds, the hills and the plains, in front of one, a diversity which is rare in any part of the world.

I may be a travel junkie and love driving for the fun of it plus I can select very good highways in the vicinity to hit the road, but for a majority of the people in the country the use of roads is an everyday necessity. You cannot have a decent quality life anywhere in the country without quality roads. Whether you go to school or cycle to work, whether you go to the local mandi on your tractor to offload your produce in a bullock cart or whether you are on a road trip in a sleek car. In many ways, the first contact of a citizen with the effectiveness or lack thereof of a Government is the road s/he uses to get from Point A to Point B.

The National Highway I, for example, which connects Delhi to the two prosperous States of Punjab and Haryana, takes you to Himachal Pradesh on the one hand and Jammu & Kashmir on the other. There would hardly be any decision-maker in the Capital or in the four northern States who must not be using this road for travel purposes. The stretch between Panipat and Jalandhar should have been converted into six-lane in 2011 but it was left to the Supreme Court to issue directions to the concessionaire which ensured the completion of the project only recently.

This project should now be used as a case study in school management how not to build new road projects. It should also be used as a case study to give contracts for other road projects so that they do not get into legal wrangles and cost over runs. Drive ahead to Jalandhar in Punjab and one would find a major flyover stuck in legal mess for years together on the national highway. Every motorist, who use the highway, curse the authorities as it spoils the pleasure of their journey.

Further, there’s yet another expressway which should have been built years ago — the much awaited Kundli-Manesar-Palwal (KMP) expressway — which is expected to reduce vehicular congestion and as a result, pollution in the Capital but has perpetually been under construction with one legal issue or the other cropping up every time. This can be yet another case study of a project in the management of schools with the chapter saying: How not to build a road; KMP case study!

What perplexes me the most is that most national highways have perpetually been under construction since years. Most of them are being six-laned. Two decades back, the National Highways Authority of India  was under the process of converting the highways into four-lanes. I wonder whether construction and widening would be a permanent feature of the roads. Half a decade from now, the need will be of eight-lane roads and maybe 15-20 years down, the volume of traffic may force the authorities to have 20-lane roads.

One fails to understand what prevents the authorities from constructing 12-lane roads straight away in important stretches, keeping in view the traffic scenario of 2040? It does not require rocket science to know that the number of vehicles on roads keep increasing everyday and vehicles need space to move. I am sure after the six-laning of NH-8, which goes to Jaipur and Mumbai, the need will again be to make eight-laned roads in the next five years and then 10-laned roads in another 15 years from now. Why not build it today itself? If it’s not planned today, construction activities will continue all the time and one will hardly find a 200-250 km of expressway free from construction or broadening activities.

The Ambala-Zirakpur (Chandigarh) stretch was four-laned only six years ago and already the need is being felt to widen it to six-lane with multi-storied housing complexes coming in vicinity of Chandigarh and accompanying vehicles clogging the road. What worsens the situation is the fact that whenever a new stretch of road comes up, there is heightened economic activity around it. Housing colonies are built, shops, eateries and small scale establishments come up and even rural population shifts towards the road to take benefit of the new economic activity.

In the last few years, there has been hectic construction activity on NH from Delhi to Amritsar, Delhi to Jaipur and Delhi to Lucknow via Moradabad and Bareilly. Shifting of economic activity in and around the roads will lead to a situation where only a few stretches alongside the highway will be left for paddy or mustard fields as the remaining space will be gobbled up by commercial activities.

Coming back to the joy of travelling on the road, nothing can beat the hilarious shop sign — ‘child bear’ sold here. It’s only when you take the kids to see the baby bear and are confronted by a liquor shop selling ‘chilled beer’ that the truth dawns.

Trucks, however, rule the roost when it comes to innovative slogans. Most slogans appeared like works of fledgling litterateurs, who could not get their work 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 frightening slogan. I was brave enough and overtook the truck without any fuss. The driver merely brought out an extended palm from the window of his huge vehicle and facilitated the overtake without taking the slogan written on his truck seriously.

Imagination ran wild in the case of some slogans. Recently, on a trip to Shimla, 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. However, in equally bold letters followed Jai Ho. So, the entire slogan read: Teri Ma ki jai ho. I never came 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 maximum number of trucks and read like 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 1 was giving a bathing soap free for every 100 litres of diesel and the limit was 400 litres. Half a dozen of trucks and their drivers were lazing around early morning in the vicinity of the fuel station, giving an indication that marketing strategy indeed worked.

At another, if a driver had to use a clean toilet, he had to fill in fuel first. Fill the tank, get a slip and then show it to the guard in front of the toilet to ease yourself. Another private fuel station had kept a log book of the diesel filled in by a particular vehicle in a month. The prizes were good-set of steel glasses for 1,000 litres, briefcase for 2,000 litres, branded shirt so on and so forth.  Business on roads has become quite innovative over the months and years. Knowing about it is the perk of road travel. (17 Dec, 2017)  

 http://www.dailypioneer.com/sunday-edition/agenda/opinion/eyes-on-the-road-and-hands-upon-the-wheel.html

No thought for pedestrians

Amitabh Shukla

New Delhi, November 29

When Transport Minister Haroon Yusuf and other officials of his department went for a conference on Transport to San Francisco recently, they were in for a surprise. In most of the presentations on futuristic transport scenario, walking was considered a mode of transport. It was being planned along with other modes of public and private transport.

On a reality check, officials found that in Delhi, pedestrian traffic was never thought about by the policy planners. It is only the motorised means of transport and faster traffic which has been the main concern of the urban traffic and transport planners.

“For the traffic engineers, planners and others, the word pedestrian is not even in their vocabulary,” said Geetam Tiwari, traffic expert and professor at IIT Delhi. She said that Delhi has invested a huge amount in the last few years in upgrading road infrastructure – constructing flyovers and arterial roads. “No consideration was ever made for the pedestrians in these,” she says.

Transport Minister Haroon Yusuf admitted that pedestrian traffic is somewhat a neglected area. “We would like to promote easy movement of pedestrians and construct cycle tracks and efforts would be made in this direction,” he said. Yusuf informed that the High Capacity Bus corridor between Ambedkar Nagar and Ambedkar Stadium would have a separate corridor for cyclists and the pedestrians.

Officials in the department point out that the sanctity of the zebra crossing has to be maintained at all costs. “In foreign countries, when a pedestrian crosses the road, the entire traffic comes to a halt. Here, the pedestrians have to jostle with the motorised traffic for road space and often pay for their lives in the process,” said an official.

Tiwari suggested that suitable changes should be made in the signaling system so that it becomes pedestrian friendly. “The signal cycle should be shorter so that the pedestrians don’t cross the road in a hurry,” she said. Tiwari rubbished the idea of constructing subways, overhead bridges and even escalator driver foot over bridges. “While the first two are inconvenient, the escalator cannot be maintained in open areas,” she pointed out.

An officials, who went abroad for the conference summed up saying it all comes down to adherence of law. “If two American drivers drive in the city streets for a while, they too would become like the Indian drivers – careless and carefree with least concern for the pedestrians. On the other hand, if two Indian drivers drive in the streets in a US city, they too would follow the stringent rules and regulations in force there,” he said. (2005)

Delhi, UP ink transport pact

Amitabh Shukla

June 3

The UP and Delhi governments on Monday signed a transport agreement for smooth and better public transport between the Capital and the neighbouring state. The pact, signed after 23 years, will benefit lakhs of residents of Uttar Pradesh who commute to Delhi everyday.

“We were running bus services to Lahore in Pakistan but not to Ghaziabad. This was embarrassing for both the governments. All disputes have now been laid to rest,” said Delhi Transport Minister Haroon Yusuf after the two Transport Secretaries signed a draft agreement. Yusuf’s counterpart in UP, Ram Achal Rajbhar said it was extremely important for both the states.

Commuters of UP and Delhi had a torrid time for six months from November 2006 to May 2007 when both the state governments seized each other buses and practically declared a “transport war”. Lakhs of commuters faced hardships and the Delhi-UP border resembled borders of two warring countries. When Mayawati became the Chief Minister of UP in May last year, the crisis was over but still there was no agreement on the movement of the buses and other vehicles.

From now on, stage carriage services bus would operate between NCR townships in UP and Delhi. The places connected would be Delhi Airport via Nehru Place and Vasant Vihar, airport via Badarpur and Mehrauli, Central Secretariat via Ashram and CGO complex, New Delhi Railway Station via Pragati Maidan and Shivaji Stadium, ISBT (Kashmere Gate) via Shahdara and Shakarpur, ISBT (Kashmere Gate) via Anand Vihar and Bhajanpura, NOIDA to Safdarjung Terminus via Sarai Kale Khan, Ashram and AIIMS.

The existing DTC and private buses in Noida and Greater Noida would continue to be an extension of the city operation by Delhi's buses.

The minister said that the next step was to provide taxi and auto rickshaw services between NCR and Delhi.

(2008)

http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/Print/314888.aspx

Lakhs suffer from inter-state transport crisis

Amitabh Shukla

Nov 20, 2006

As lakhs of passengers between the NCR cities and Delhi continued to slug it out due to the transport crisis between Delhi and UP, both the governments continued with their battle of wits.

None of them made any initiative on Monday to end the deadlock which has resulted in harassment for thousands of commuters. "The scene at the Delhi border resembles the film Garam Hawa," said Delhi Transport Minister Haroon Yusuf. The film shows people moving to India or Pakistan in the wake of partition with their luggage perched on their heads.

As the inter-state or long route buses of UP Transport too are terminating at the border rather than at the ISBTs, the passengers are carrying their luggage on their head while entering the Delhi border. After walking a fair distance with the luggage, the passengers then board a city route bus for their destination.

“I feel sorry to see the plight of the people. But, UP has made it an ego issue and is not budging an inch for a bus agreement between the two states,” said Yusuf. The Transport Minister said UP has so far impounded 122 DTC buses and the government was filing application in the courts to get them released. The 11 buses of UP Transport Corporation, seized by Delhi, have already been released.

Yusuf said: “How can Delhi permit plying of UP buses on the city routes?” The minister said in such an eventuality, there would be no control on these buses and there will be complete chaos on the roads. “If we allow UP, Haryana, Rajasthan and Punjab would start plying their buses on city routes,” he added.

Meanwhile, former Union Minister Vijay Goel flashed an agreement signed between Delhi and UP in August 2004 and said it undermined the interests of Delhi. “The agreement said DTC buses would run 90,000 kms in UP while UP buses would run 30,000 kms in Delhi,” he said. Goel said, UP was running buses in the city routes as per this agreement. “The two state governments are fighting like the Indian and Pakistan governments who expel each other’s diplomats,” said Goel.

As the governments fight, the passengers have been left in the lurch. “It took three hours for me to reach Nehru Place from Vasundhara in Ghaziabad, a journey which normally takes a little over an hour,” said Mukesh Kumar, a daily commuter. “I regret relocating to UP,” he added.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/Print/175343.aspx