Contractor Raj

Blowing in the wind from fans along a UP expressway

If you haven’t watched the “only fans” show on Lucknow-Kanpur Expressway, you’ve missed a milestone of Indian engineering. A showpiece road, built at a cost of ₹6.7L per metre – yes, each metre costs as much as a good hatchback car – crumbles a fortnight after inauguration. To dry the road bed for repairs, the contractor sets up 10 ordinary pedestal fans under monsoon clouds. It’s a true leap of imagination and faith, and it would be funny if it weren’t so serious.

For over 30 years, lack of transport infra has been a bottleneck for India’s growth. After all, you can’t have factories without roads to take out finished goods and bring in raw materials. So, we’ve been building a lot of highways and expressways lately, but of what kind? A part of the new Dehradun Expressway cracks due to lack of drainage. A bridge on the Tons river loses its ramp 17 days after inauguration. Landslides shut down a tunnel on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway’s ‘Missing Link’. And now, the pedestal fan farce between Lucknow and Kanpur. Across the country, L-shaped flyovers and bridges to nowhere have also cropped up.

The rot is obvious. You can sense it in design and supervision, when rocks rain down on the widened Shimla highway 10 years after work started. But more in shoddy execution, north to south, east to west, as contractors deliver Third-World toll roads at First-World rates. Penalties and blacklisting are no deterrent because politically connected contractors in every field can always bounce back under another name. We saw this recently in the CBSE-Coempt EduTeck fiasco. But this loot has to end because shoddy highway work imposes a heavy cost on us. First as tax, and then as lost growth, time and lives.