How Important are Roads to us?, On any given day, I travel atleast 15 km on roads, small and big ones all included, probably everyone uses them in their day to day life. Roads have been and will be an integral part of a individual's life for years to come until we devise a way to travel in cable cars like people(and robots) did in Asimov's novels or until someone is succesfull with his Teleporting experiment.
India's road network at 3.5 million km of roads is only a little shy of the distance between earth and Moon. India is vast, and most developed countries are comparable in size only to a small region of India. So the problems we have are much different and in bigger magnitude when compared to what they faced building their road networks. For our sake of ease lets classify the road network in India into the following four categories
1. National Highways (NH Roads)
2. State Highways (SH Roads)
3. City/District Roads (Both Arterial and Non Arterial)
4. Urban Roads (75%)
Issues we face
Inspite of our greater dependence on roads, we still treat them very shabbily and do not give them the importance they deserve. A look at roads today would reveal different kinds of problems. Some of the the common issues we face with most of these roads are similar and can be classified under these major heads,
i Existing Roads that are narrow or substandard.
ii Existing Roads that are badly maintained
iii Non Existent Roads.
lets cover some of these issues here,
Substandard roads -
Most NH and SH roads in India are two laned, causing slow speeds and congestion issues( A census shows that only only 2 to 3% of the primary network in India is 4 laned). Most of our NH roads pass through the cities,adding to the city traffic and causing more congestion. By routing NH roads through cities,the traffic flow in smaller roads is being increased to a magnitude that are not capable of taking. This causes more wear and tear on the smaller city roads and thereby increasing maintenance costs. A common solution for this issue, is to build NH roads such that they by pass cities hence reducing the traffic flow into state and city roads.
A look at city roads reveal that enroachments are a major issue. A typical 100 feet road in India only has a carriage way of 70 feet. The rest 30 feet is lost due to enroachments by street hawkers and other haphazard drivers who park their vehicles on the roads. Just making sure that the enroachments are being removed regularly, would ensure that we have enough space available to the road users.
The urbans face a different kind of issue, most of their roads are of the Kutcha type and therefore are not suitable for vehicular traffic, the only solution here would be to make sure that we increase the coverage of pucca roads in villages.
Bad Roads - Next major issue with most roads are related to poor maintenance of roads. This is very common in cities and villages alike. A cursory look would reveal that the roads in India haven't grown in the same pace as the number of vehicles have, this means these roads are bearing capacities many times more than they were built for.
Non existent Roads - Many regions of India are still unconnected to the mainland country. This problem is severe in NE states like Meghalaya, Assam etc. which has very poor connectivity to the rest of the country.
A look at the issues would reveal that road development in India has been neglected for quite some time now. The only major development that we saw was the Golden quadrilateral project initiated by BJP a few years back. Reasons for this neglect included among many things Red tapism in the government bodies in awarding contracts and non conducive environment for private partnerships. The end sufferer were the common folks who was left to break his spine traveling on the bad roads. The road conditions and network are a major factor of consideration for most MNC's when they decide to set up shop at a particular location. Even Indian majors have started assigning a importance to the availability of good road network before they make a decision on locating their facilities. The recent decisions by companies like Infosys and Wipro to expand in other cities were due to reason that Bangalore had not focused on improving their Infrastructure (Particular refernces were made by NR Murthy to the bad state of road network) leading to poor connectivities and duels between India Inc and state governments.
The problems we face in maintaining and building new networks are related to the investments they need. One study estimates that Maintaining India’s present highway network to full maintenance standards will require annual funding of about Rs. 70 billion, and that is not including the investments to build new roads. Given that India is developing and facing many other issues including poverty, power etc , It would be unfair to expect all the investment to be focusedd on developing road network. Given the scenario, we have quite a few tried and trusted methods that we can use to garner that kind of money including
Toll/ cess on the road users
Annual vehicle fee
Fuel Cess ( Fuel cess in India is among the lowest in the world)
Private Funding
Return more road related revenue back to the sector and more
Some of these methods like Toll/ cess, Private participation are already of revenue generation are already in vogue, but still the methodology is not mature to be adopted widely. for eg, There are quite a lot of impediments in the current policies that do not allow for a smooth Private sector funding, like the legal environment for dispute resolution, toll determination, contract monitoring processes etc.
Article will continue
India's road network at 3.5 million km of roads is only a little shy of the distance between earth and Moon. India is vast, and most developed countries are comparable in size only to a small region of India. So the problems we have are much different and in bigger magnitude when compared to what they faced building their road networks. For our sake of ease lets classify the road network in India into the following four categories
1. National Highways (NH Roads)
2. State Highways (SH Roads)
3. City/District Roads (Both Arterial and Non Arterial)
4. Urban Roads (75%)
Issues we face
Inspite of our greater dependence on roads, we still treat them very shabbily and do not give them the importance they deserve. A look at roads today would reveal different kinds of problems. Some of the the common issues we face with most of these roads are similar and can be classified under these major heads,
i Existing Roads that are narrow or substandard.
ii Existing Roads that are badly maintained
iii Non Existent Roads.
lets cover some of these issues here,
Substandard roads -
Most NH and SH roads in India are two laned, causing slow speeds and congestion issues( A census shows that only only 2 to 3% of the primary network in India is 4 laned). Most of our NH roads pass through the cities,adding to the city traffic and causing more congestion. By routing NH roads through cities,the traffic flow in smaller roads is being increased to a magnitude that are not capable of taking. This causes more wear and tear on the smaller city roads and thereby increasing maintenance costs. A common solution for this issue, is to build NH roads such that they by pass cities hence reducing the traffic flow into state and city roads.
A look at city roads reveal that enroachments are a major issue. A typical 100 feet road in India only has a carriage way of 70 feet. The rest 30 feet is lost due to enroachments by street hawkers and other haphazard drivers who park their vehicles on the roads. Just making sure that the enroachments are being removed regularly, would ensure that we have enough space available to the road users.
The urbans face a different kind of issue, most of their roads are of the Kutcha type and therefore are not suitable for vehicular traffic, the only solution here would be to make sure that we increase the coverage of pucca roads in villages.
Bad Roads - Next major issue with most roads are related to poor maintenance of roads. This is very common in cities and villages alike. A cursory look would reveal that the roads in India haven't grown in the same pace as the number of vehicles have, this means these roads are bearing capacities many times more than they were built for.
Non existent Roads - Many regions of India are still unconnected to the mainland country. This problem is severe in NE states like Meghalaya, Assam etc. which has very poor connectivity to the rest of the country.
A look at the issues would reveal that road development in India has been neglected for quite some time now. The only major development that we saw was the Golden quadrilateral project initiated by BJP a few years back. Reasons for this neglect included among many things Red tapism in the government bodies in awarding contracts and non conducive environment for private partnerships. The end sufferer were the common folks who was left to break his spine traveling on the bad roads. The road conditions and network are a major factor of consideration for most MNC's when they decide to set up shop at a particular location. Even Indian majors have started assigning a importance to the availability of good road network before they make a decision on locating their facilities. The recent decisions by companies like Infosys and Wipro to expand in other cities were due to reason that Bangalore had not focused on improving their Infrastructure (Particular refernces were made by NR Murthy to the bad state of road network) leading to poor connectivities and duels between India Inc and state governments.
The problems we face in maintaining and building new networks are related to the investments they need. One study estimates that Maintaining India’s present highway network to full maintenance standards will require annual funding of about Rs. 70 billion, and that is not including the investments to build new roads. Given that India is developing and facing many other issues including poverty, power etc , It would be unfair to expect all the investment to be focusedd on developing road network. Given the scenario, we have quite a few tried and trusted methods that we can use to garner that kind of money including
Toll/ cess on the road users
Annual vehicle fee
Fuel Cess ( Fuel cess in India is among the lowest in the world)
Private Funding
Return more road related revenue back to the sector and more
Some of these methods like Toll/ cess, Private participation are already of revenue generation are already in vogue, but still the methodology is not mature to be adopted widely. for eg, There are quite a lot of impediments in the current policies that do not allow for a smooth Private sector funding, like the legal environment for dispute resolution, toll determination, contract monitoring processes etc.
Article will continue
2 comments:
Suresh, thanks for directing me here through ur blog...
i would love to see more money put into public transportation :-)... the no. of private vehicles is just too big (in cities like bglr for example) that even if we maintain the roads, it may not suffice (unless some expansion of roads by accumulating land)... given this constraint, i think more money to do a one-time public transportation should help... also helps in reducing pollution and reduced environmental damages!
will wait for the second part :-)
Nice to see your comment karthik. Yes, Some of the cities are literally choking and public infrastructure is not something we can brag about. If all the money spent goes where it needs to instead of the pockets of politicians , India would have been much better placed on that front. Like you said, cities like Bglr have been riding on the IT wave, and now with a IT shop on every street, organisations are feeling the better infrastructure.
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