Blog: Highways To Sudden Death

So finally, someone up there, well not up up there, but up in the mountain of bureaucracy, seems to have realised that maintaining highways is as important as building new ones. (1) This revelation in the Ministry of Transport seems to have come with the understanding that highways with potholes are a dangerous breed and can cause the untimely death of many a person. For this, the nation must be eternally grateful, assuming that the pace at which the repair is carried out is more exemplary than the speed with which files and contracts usually move.

The fact is that while the government has launched a huge operation to build greenfield highways throughout the country, to provide better roadways and faster access, the old National Highways seem to have been forgotten, to misquote Shakespeare, on the dusty road to death. And that's exactly what they are - roads to death, or at least accidents. (2) National Highways account for more than a third of all accidents and deaths.

With just 2 per cent of the road length, National Highways account for almost 37 per cent of all road deaths. If you were to remove pedestrian deaths and rickshaws etc, which are more common in towns and cities, the percentage of accidents on National Highways is close to 50 per cent.

Of course, the problem isn't just the highways. It is us, the drivers, who being mainly self-trained and taught, have little respect for the rules of the road. Our idea of highway driving (or any driving for that matter) is to climb onto our chosen vehicle and try and beat the land speed record to wherever we are headed. To this end we will weave our way dextrously, changing lanes and jumping queues, lights and even going on the wrong side of the road. Nobody has an answer to why we are so obsessed with getting to our destination so quickly, given that in everything else we do, we care little about time. How many of your dinner guests arrive before 9:30 pm?

While we mourn our national disease of rash driving, much is wrong with the highways that we pay for. Yes, many of them are toll ways, and you pay as you go, and so you assume that the money so earned is ploughed back into maintaining the highway you drive on. Alas, that isn't true. Where the money goes is anyone's guess, but it ain't into maintaining the National Highway that I recently took from Delhi to Jaipur and back, NH 48.

The maintenance here is so bad, that in continuing bits, the tar has melted and formed waves, yes waves; if you were to hit these at 60 kmph or faster the driver would lose control of the steering wheel (especially as we specialise in one hand car driving). I emphasis the melting tar waves rather than the countless potholes because this cannot be passed off as a recent monsoon effect. Now it cannot be that the toll plaza concessionaires haven't noticed this, but obviously they have little incentive to do anything about it.

The second question that arises, but is never asked, is what is the quality of construction that has allowed the tar to so melt? And why are there so many potholes? Potholes happen for many reasons but the primary one is substandard materials used in construction. Does anyone check the construction quality? When was the last time the government engineers who cleared the construction were questioned about this? Has anyone heard anything more about the recent disappearance of a part of the newly-constructed Bundelkhand highway? Anyone arrested for poor workmanship?

To the pot of bad driving and bad maintenance add no policing. In our 12 hours on the highway, back and forth, there were exactly two police vehicles, both nearer Jaipur, who were fining speeding. Which they should. But that was it. Two police checks in 500 km? While speeding is checked, there is absolutely no effort to control where trucks drive. Most of them take the easy way out and drive in the right lane at speeds that they can manage, 50-60 kmph. Which means that if you are in a car, you can either travel behind the trucks and take 8-10 hours on this journey, or do what everyone seems to do, overtake from the left.

Now we come to the tragic bit, the bit that led to the untimely death recently of Cyrus Mistry. From all reports the car may have been overtaking from the left. The road wasn't in good repair, and finally the road suddenly shrank from three lanes to two, without warning. This is true of many points on national highways, where most of the highway is three lanes but a number of bridges and culverts have two lanes. Is there a sign indicating this sudden narrowing? Not a chance. The only signal will be the traffic in front suddenly pulling to the right while jamming on the brakes. Anywhere else in the world the signage for such narrowing begins more than a kilometre before.

As we head into the era of superhighways, there is a crying need to fix what we have. What is the liability of the person driving? What should be done to contractors who have done shoddy work? What is the duty of the concessionaire in maintaining the roads and signage? When will the state provide highway police and when will they police road hogging by trucks? Until we deal with all these issues, the lakhs of crores of new highways will only add to the death toll through accidents. It will take only a minuscule amount that we are spending on new highways to fix the old. Toll collections are around Rs 40,000 crore, surely some of it can go into maintaining the old highways? Let's spend that now. Otherwise we will continue to mourn the loss of people like Cyrus Mistry and thousands of others.

1. A Google search throws up many recent reports of NHAI asking for repairs on the National Highways. This is just one.

2. The Ministry of Transport latest report for 2020.

(Ishwari Bajpai is Senior Advisor at NDTV.)

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author.