Nishmanya Bahadur with his car at Chilika Lake, Odisha.
Credit: Nishmanya Bahadur
Bengaluru: Having embarked on a daring solo trip across the country, an independent automobile writer and YouTuber, who is on his final leg of a 15-day road trip across the Golden Quadrilateral, briefly stopped in Bengaluru on Saturday. He will conclude his trip in Mumbai on Monday.
Speaking to DH, Nishmanya Bahadur, a 26-year-old YouTuber from Mumbai, decided to go on this ‘Atal Yatra’ to celebrate 25 years since the road corridor’s foundation stone was laid on January 6, 1999, by former prime minister, the late Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
Nishmanya set out from Nariman Point, Mumbai, at 7 am on February 12, with a clear goal of driving about 500 km each day on the corridor that connects the country’s major metropolitan cities of Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, and Chennai, covering the length of 5,846 km across 13 states.
“I plotted each step with my family, finding short halts along the way. We planned all the logistics, including safety tools, vehicle supplies, emergency medical kits, phone numbers of people we knew, hotels and other things, which took a little over a month to plan,” he said.
The trip is Nishmanya’s effort to get the general public to appreciate the ‘backbone of the country’s economic activities’ and is sponsored by Bharat Petroleum, Hindustan Petroleum, and Tata Motors, who lent him his ride, a sleek Tata Harrier.
He set aside about Rs 70,000 for fuel for the entirety of the trip, while he spent Rs 6,000 to Rs 7,000 for his stay at each location.
Nishmanya will travel to Belagavi on Sunday, before completing the final stretch of the trip through Kolhapur, Satara and Pune, before reaching Mumbai on Monday evening.