Contractor Raj
Blowing in the wind from fans along a UP expressway
If you haven’t seen the “only-fans” show on the Lucknow-Kanpur Expressway, you’ve missed a strange new chapter in Indian engineering. A fancy new road, built at ₹6.7 lakh per metre — about the price of a good small car — started falling apart just two weeks after it opened. To dry the road before repairing it, the contractor brought out 10 ordinary pedestal fans, even as monsoon clouds hung overhead. It would be hilarious if it weren’t so serious.
For more than 30 years, poor transport has held back India’s growth. Factories need good roads to bring in raw materials and send out finished products. That is why India has been building lots of highways and expressways. But what kind of roads are we building? Part of the new Dehradun Expressway cracked because water could not drain properly. A bridge over the Tons river lost its ramp just 17 days after it opened. Landslides shut a tunnel on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway’s new ‘Missing Link’. And now we have the pedestal-fan drama between Lucknow and Kanpur. Across India, we have also seen strange L-shaped flyovers and bridges that seem to lead nowhere.
The problem is easy to see. Sometimes the roads are badly designed or poorly supervised. But the bigger problem is often poor construction. From north to south and east to west, contractors are building low-quality toll roads while charging high prices. Fines and blacklisting don’t seem to scare them because contractors with political connections can often return under a new name. We saw a similar mess recently in the CBSE-Coempt EduTeck fiasco.
This kind of loot has to stop. Bad roads cost us twice: first through our taxes, and then through lost time, slower economic growth and, sometimes, even lost lives.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
