In the context of yesterday's anti-toll agitation, dna believes toll tax can be removed. Naval Ghiara explains why:
Anna Hazare and Raj Thackeray both say the numbers for Maharashtra's toll roads don't add up.
Both have said motor vehicle taxes are substantial and should be used to pay for roads. According to a government audit, motor vehicle taxes were Rs3,531 crore in 2010. And we have 230,000 kilometre of roads. This means in 2010 alone the government earned Rs1.5 lakh per kilometre from vehicle taxes alone.
According to government sources, tolls earn only Rs750 crore annually. Or Rs32,000 per kilometre per year, less than Rs100 per day.
Ergo 1: Road taxes are already five times higher than tolls collected, so why bother to collect tolls?
Ergo 2: How to believe CM Prithviraj Chauhan's contention that without tolls there will be no roads?
The real truth: road taxes collected from road users are used elsewhere.
Both Hazare and Thackeray say tolls have no transparent link to costs.
Maharashtra has privatised 137 roads and these have a combined length of 4,685km. This is just 2% of the total road length.
But tolls fetch collectors Rs16 lakh per kilometre per year or Rs480 lakh per kilometre over a concession period of 30 years.
So is this number too high?
It depends on what it costs to build one kilometre of road. According to the Pradhan Mantri Sadak Yojana, Maharashtra spent Rs6-8 lakh per kilometre for rural roads, India's lowest.
Complicated urban roads like Mumbai's Eastern Freeway could reasonably cost more and did. This cost Rs73 crore per kilometre. Do we know why? Even over 30 years, they would need to collect Rs243 lakh per kilometre, per year, to break even.
So what to believe?
Data is very hard to come by. A World Bank Study completed in 2000 arrived at an average cost of construction per kilometre of Rs5.4 crore (across 40 countries).
So there is still a difference of 900 times in cost of construction between a kilometre of rural road and a kilometre of the Eastern Freeway and the government is not explaining why.
When the Mumbai police "detained" Raj Thackeray on Wednesday morning, the liberals in the city were not surprised. They were happy to confirm their prejudices, to add to their lazy mental picture of the MNS chief as "the other", the rabble-rouser unwilling to use "civilised means".
But given the great injustice, there is always a case for hitting the streets: even Gandhiji took to the streets for freedom disregarding Gokhale's belief in constitutional means.
But even on constitutional means, the beautiful weapon of our tribe, we cannot fault Raj Thackeray this time. He filed a PIL in the Bombay high court. It is still to be heard. He asked the Maharashtra government to review the policy. But nothing happened.
When he saw there was nothing in the conduct of these institutions "to justify those hopes with which gentlemen have been pleased to solace themselves", to quote Patrick Henry and his speech for freedom, he acted.
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