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| The mess that is our infrastructure | | |
The one thing that one could say about the Vajpayee government was that it did a lot for India’s infrastructure especially its highways when it was in government. Sadly, this government has negated it all. T.R. Baalu is a great one for blaming everyone every time he is a minister and it’s time that the Prime Minister sacked him. We don’t need ministers who run ministries which do no work. If the PM wants Baalu in the Cabinet, it is best to give him animal husbandry or some important assignment such as that. He is a disaster at what he is presently doing and it shows.
Not only do we have incompetent and at times corrupt ministers running critical ministries such as these, we have equally incompetent contractors as well. I am aghast at the tardy progress that is being made by DS Constructions as far the Delhi-Gurgaon connector is concerned and privately, the people who run this construction group abuse the minister and blame him for all the delays. The problem, however, is that try getting to the Delhi international airport and see the kind of time it takes. It is a nightmare. I drove to the international airport last week to catch a flight to London and I saw not a single worker working on the connector. But no one says anything to either these tardy contractors or incompetent ministers.
The airports are equally a sad story. It is a shame that India has not got its airport act together even after so much of a hullabaloo. It is a shame that Mumbai, many a time, operates only one runway and airlines like Jet on the domestic circuit are running every flight with at least an hour’s delay. I landed on a British Airways flight at Mumbai and connected on a Jet flight to Delhi: the Jet flight to Delhi took a long time thanks to both the airline’s inefficiencies as also the nonsense that the ATC subjects us to. My point here is very simple. There is no point appointing private sector johnnies who do nothing about what they are supposed to be doing. Apart from fancy security guards outside the terminal building, I see no progress being made by GMR which has got the contract for the Delhi airport. Add to that the fact that the Airports Authority of India is unarguably the worst public sector organisation in this country which bleeds airlines for profits, but does nothing as far as airport upkeep is concerned, and you have the mess that I am talking about!
But then does anyone care?
We cannot be comparing ourselves to China at the drop of the Sensex because we will never get there. For a country which is in the throes of economic revival and resurgence, our infrastructure is pitiable. Our roads are a mess, our highways don’t exist and we have a bunch of jokers running key ministries. The truth of the matter is, we don’t care. I admire the tenacity of the chief justice of India when it comes to cleaning up Delhi, but then has the chief justice wandered around Delhi and seen for himself that there are very few legal commercial buildings? All of Okhla is a mess. And Sainik Farms is another story. It is all right for the Supreme Court to take up cudgels on behalf of a dying city, but how do the Lordships of the Supreme Court sleep at night when they know Sainik Farms exists in gross violation of every law and yet there is no sealing in Sainik Farms? It is this duality of purpose that worries me.
Mumbai is a similar mess. It is indeed sad that there too a Congress government has run the city into the ground. So busy are the people running the state with their own infighting that no one has the time to concentrate on the mess that exists and do something about it. For a city that is truly India’s commercial capital, Mumbai is an absolute mess.
I believe the time has come for cities such as Delhi and Mumbai to be converted into manageable city-states where the administration that governs the city has a stake in it. We need mayors who can and will act, not some chief minister who has been elected from some Vidarbha village and has no stake in the city. Mumbai desperately needs a dose of some workable infrastructure as does Delhi.
I guess if we don’t do something about some of these critical areas, then we will have nothing to show for progress except foundation stones. I also believe the time has come for some drastic steps. For errant contractors and ministers the punishment should be swift ejection. A whole city cannot be held to ransom by inept and incompetent people.
I hope the Prime Minister realises that it is one thing to talk about nine per cent GDP growth but quite another to run a country where roads also get built. Given the track record of people building these roads and that of the johnnies in government, I guess we will have to wait for another Sher Shah Suri and not just a Manmohan Singh!
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