Our local roads are a national shame

We have seen significant improvement in the quality as well as network-length of our highways in recent years even if the rate of development of the network has lagged the ambitions of the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways.

The National Highways Authority of India (NHAI), set up in 1988, has emerged as the nodal agency for the management of highways. It manages about 50,000 km of the total network of some 1,15,000 km, with a mandate to implement the National Highways Development Projects over several phases since 2000, even if their works have been punctuated with criticism of serious delays, corruption and fraud.

That said, the state of Indian highways is nevertheless much better than our more travelled roads –the ordinary rural and urban roads, upon which the great majority of our population traverses on a daily basis. These roads are overseen by a multitude of state governments, municipal authorities and assorted local bodies, which barely interact with each other to bring about even a modicum of standardisation or uniformity across roads.

At a time when internationally road construction and maintenance have been evolving into highly scientific exercises, our local roads are a pell-mell mess of minimal primitive tarring where rules are for fools – no matter whether the rules pertain to road-laying by the local authorities or road-use by the populace.

We urgently need to establish a national nodal agency for non-highway roads, to supervise all local roads. Such an agency would coordinate across the many agencies responsible for laying and managing of the local roads with the objective of achieving some basic standardisation of roads-architecture and improving the country’s driving habits, if only to reduce the deaths on our roads.

A cursory look at our roads highlights several obvious areas of improvement, each of which could probably do with a National Mission of sorts.

Our roads lack basic lane-lines leave alone more advanced surface markings such as solid, broken, single and double white and yellow lines, directional lines, diagonal lines, zebra markings, parking markings etc. Most internal roads do not even have basic standardised traffic signage (our National Highways are better in this regard).

While some of the key junctions in our cities and towns may have a modicum of traffic lights, the national percentage of road-crossings with traffic signals is perhaps less than 15%. Functioning signals for pedestrians to cross a busy junction are virtually non-existent, and as are walkable sidewalks.

Length for which traffic lights stay on seems entirely random. As a country that prides itself on its information technology (IT) prowess, there is no reason why intelligent systems cannot be coupled with traffic lights to optimise traffic flow.

Sheer absence of sidewalks, leave alone standards for them such as width, height and banking at the end for ease of pedestrians, is a criminal neglect in a country where a vast majority of population walks on the streets, and many among them die for lack of walking space. Nor are our roads familiar with discernible shoulders to prevent the wearing off at the edges.

There are no standards – at least none that are enforced – for potholes and road humps nor any for manhole covers which are a foot above or below the road surface, all of which effectively reduce the available road space and are major causes of accidents.

Corrupt officials

Another phenomenon, exacerbated by corrupt local officials, is the turning of a blind eye to the private generators of commercial complexes, construction material or other ware, dumped on sidewalks and public spaces. Electricity boards freely use the pavements to plonk their grids and junction boxes, rather than suitably raise them above the street level.

Another nuisance emerging on our roads, likely to assume epidemic proportions soon, relates to abandoned automobiles on the roadsides. With few wrecking-yards of automobiles available, we find it easier to simply dump our old vehicles on the roadside.

And we are not even referring to the poor quality of construction of our roads, or holy cows and their male counterparts occupying prime road space alongside other assorted animals, garbage dumped on the roadsides, sand on the edges of the roads or pavements occupied by hawkers -- all of which prevent full use of the roadspace.

Unless we recognise the above areas as problems that need solving, there can never be a start. It is in this sense that a national nodal agency, with sub-offices in each state, brought about through appropriate legislation, needs to work towards nudging the Indian roads into a measure of a functioning system.

There still remains the gaping need to improve the driving habits of the road users through tightened driving licensing system, superior road signage and stricter enforcement of penalties through a trained vertical in the traffic constabulary.

All this needs concerted effort on war-footing. Simply training or conditioning our road users to follow lane discipline and leaving the outermost lane for overtaking alone (on highways) can go a long way in improving our traffic flow. But we have to recognise first that we are primitive in all these dimensions.

When would over so-called leaders ever find the time to improve the standards of governance in mundane matters such as these? Alas, we may have a long wait.