Expanding national highways is not the road to the future

The myopia of our mandarins continues. Union minister of road transport and highways Kamal Nath, on taking office, grandiosely announced that ‘the central government intends to spend Rs100,000 crore on building roads’. He said he wanted to build 20km of roads every day.

One may ask what is wrong with the idea, as these roads will connect villages and make travelling within cities better. But specifically, these are not village or city roads; these are highways and they are not being built, but are being expanded. A four-lane highway is being turned into a six-lane.

The first question is: Why is the government spending so much on national highways when the common man rarely uses them? India has the world’s second largest road network at around 33,00,000 km of roads; national highways constitute just 70,548km or around 2%. The government intends to spend Rs100,000 crore on sprucing up 2% of India’s roads! Of course, it must be noted that the national highways are important for the movement of goods, since they carry 50% of the country’s freight.

But it still doesn’t explain why the government is spending such a large sum of money on national highways. If this money was spent on a billion people, each would get Rs1,000; it can fund MNREGA for more than 10 years; it is also several times the amount that the government has spent on city roads under JNNURM.

The reason this is happening is because our bureaucrats and ministers seek importance from how much their ministries can spend.  If they don’t have the money, they will give the projects to private companies, who will charge every individual who uses these roads.  In a way, this money will come out of your pocket as you will either pay the toll every time you use these highways, or in the form of higher prices for commodities that travel on these roads to reach you.

The private companies may or may not rebuild these roads, but they will certainly build toll plazas and the ministry will give them the license to charge toll. And this is the second reason for not fixing an expenditure amount: it will allow the ministry to give out licenses to companies to collect money from the common man.
If the government wanted to address the real problem, which is the movement of freight and passengers, it would have sought a more sustainable solution.

The ministry is called road transportation but its focus is on roads, not transportation. Which is why against the Rs100,000 crore being spent on roads, it is spending just Rs74 crore on public transportation.

It is a fact that vehicles using diesel or petrol are not a viable solution for moving freight or passenger; trains are more efficient. Moreover, oil prices are rising. Most oilfields have been emptied and the daily production is steadily falling; corporates are trying to find new sources of oil like shale oil.

Oil will never be cheap and will never meet the needs of the world. But electricity can be generated by coal produced locally, which will remain available for a longer period of time. Locking such a large part of our capital in building road infrastructure, which is bound to become costlier to use, will only affect India’s competitiveness in the coming years.

In such an environment, we should be channelising these funds towards building rail corridors for freight and passengers. Another part of the government is working on such a project. The Delhi-Mumbai industrial corridor will have a freight railway line alongside. This entire project requires Rs400,000 crores and is currently starved of funds. Why doesn’t the ministry of road transportation divert its resources to support this corridor?

Most passenger traffic on the national highways is concentrated around less than 500km of travel. Here too, electrified rail or metro will prove more efficient. Even cities and state government have realised that metros are the best means for mass transportation. Unfor tunately, the ministry of road transportation seems to be stuck in the 19th century, when roads were the preferred mode of transport.

If a government scam is defined as a loss of public funds due to wrong policies, expanding the national highways should be counted as such. The prime minister needs to step in and set the priority for this ministry, otherwise future generations will never forgive us for creating a colossal mess of merely widening the national highways.