Built to Break

 No one who has ever been to Bengaluru is under any illusion about its roads. Wait times are intermi­nable for traffic and, with a very limited Metro network, there is not much of an alternative. On top of that, repair work has added another layer of torture. When one of the city’s leading personalities, Biocon founder Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, posts about the state of affairs, it is just another reiteration of common knowledge. And yet, the government still manages to get offended. As when Deputy Chief Minister DK Shivakumar posted, “Ben­galuru has given opportunities, identity, and success to millions—it deserves collective effort, not constant criti­cism.” He followed it with a list of what they were doing to address the issue—10,000 potholes identified with 5,000 fixed, ₹1,100 crore sanctioned for repairs, etc—and asked every­one to “rise united”.

In fact, the solution is the problem and that is not just a Bengaluru thing. The road repair system across India is designed for corrup­tion. On paper, just about everything is de­signed to last for years, but unless contractors get a steady stream of revenues, they can’t survive. A big percent­age of what they expect to earn go into bribes to get those contracts. Making the perfect road is a path to bankruptcy. Earlier, these practices were conducted in secret; now they have stopped caring. In Mumbai, for the last few years, perfectly good roads have been dug up and laid back again, and only when public protests reached a crescendo did the civic body finally rein themselves in. Now you see the roads once again being dug. Just this week, right outside Mumbai, the highway that leads to Gujarat had a 10-hour traffic jam because “repair works” were ongoing in a major intersection.

In countries where corruption is not seeping from head to toe, repairing or laying new roads and flyovers are done with so much pre-planning that by the time the actual moment arrives, disruption to lives is negligible. Here, it is assumed that years will be spent waiting for a miracle.