About three years ago, while driving down the national highway from Delhi to Chandigarh, there was a 2-km stretch at Panipat, a town in Haryana famous for its durries that generate large export orders, that was dug up with signs along the construction site saying NHAI: Larsen & Toubro. I remember thinking then that the bottleneck would very soon become a wonderful flyover. That was not to be. The L&T project has, because of years and years of delays, degraded the area with construction material and malba piled up all over the place, compelling travellers to waste one whole hour to traverse two km, making it a symbol of one of the worst failures of infrastructure building by a commissioned private sector player of ?eminence?.
There will be a hundred explanations for this inordinate delay, but those are of no concern to the citizen. If the excuse presented is that government agencies have made it impossible for L&T to get on with the job, the company management should have either found solutions to the problems or walked out of the job and told us the reasons for doing so. This ?breakdown? on National Highway 22 is the worst advertisement for a company that professes high professionalism in the corporate world. In sharp contrast, I recall signs of an Uttar Pradesh public sector construction company that built the spaghetti flyover in Delhi at a Ring Road intersection. It was a complicated design, but did not hinder the traffic in any trying and exhausting way while it was being built. There were sensible, clear diversions for traffic during that period and the project seemed to have been completed on time.
The trauma of having to cross the L&T stretch near Panipat is nightmarish. Two kilometres and three years of failure. So much for public sector versus private players.
Haryana has huge hoardings all over the landscape selling ?fancy? apartments and ?living styles and spaces?, but it has terrible infrastructure. Rotting garbage adorns the sides of the roads, men in uniform look away, traffic snarls overwhelm the traveller, and it all comes together to define a corrupt and incompetent leadership and administration.
Appropriately. A recent poll conducted by NDTV showed Mr and Mrs Hooda losing the state three years down the road to the opposition. People cannot be fooled by incompetence laced with corruption, and both are evident on Haryana?s arterial highway from Delhi to Chandigarh. The Congress High Command needs to take serious note of this rapid degeneration and act quickly. It?s time to change the ?guard? to protect and retain the state.
Equally, there are a couple of kilometres or so between Westend and Palam in Delhi, the only artery linking the Capital with the airport, that lies is utter disarray, causing great discomfort to citizens, that is desperately waiting to be completed. It smacks of inept organisation and delivery systems that eventually equal ?incompetence?. We had always believed that government-run companies were unable to put such infrastructure into place, which is why private players were wheeled in. However, they appear equally immobile, making no substantive difference whatsoever.
These two miniscule truths reflect the failure of the state and its partners, whether from the public or private sector, and point emphatically to the lack of accountability verging on supreme arrogance and exploitation of the patience and goodwill of dignified Indians. Once again, the inherent entrepreneurship, creativity and personal grit of individuals has had to come together, become part of an energetic collective to take India forward, and accelerate her growth rate in virtually all areas of the organised and unorganised sectors of the economy?in spite of having to contend with a privileged, complacent ?authority? that has reduced itself to a greedy parasite voraciously feeding on India?s strengths, bloating its own belly and stunting real, collective growth.
This lack of political and administrative accountability is unacceptable. We must not let it run riot any longer, and we must not let the fabric of India be torn to shreds by personal ambition.
