A Holistic Approach: The Need of the Hour
The festive season is expected to witness a surge in sales of new cars. That is good for the industry, but at the same time, the roads are getting more and more crowded because the civic infrastructure is not able to keep pace with the number of new vehicles coming on to the road every day. There are many reasons for congestion: parking, poor road surface, bad traffic management, and people driving in the opposite direction of the traffic flow.
The cars today are much better than they were 25 years ago. They are faster, have better brakes, and the handling is much superior with far better tyres, but the fact remains that it takes more time to cover the same distance now compared to 25 years back.
What is the reason that it takes years to build a simple flyover bridge in India? The National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) has been building flyover bridges on the Pune-Bengaluru highway for the last three years, but they are still not ready. The tax-paying and toll-paying citizen is compelled to have recourse to diversions along this highway. Closer to home, the Sadhu Vaswani Bridge over the railway line has been under construction for over two and a half years, and it is still far from completion. It was supposed to be completed last year, then in June this year, and, according to the latest announcement, in December this year. I have my doubts about that. The detour is only one kilometre extra, but it adds many minutes to the daily commute and an extra litre of fuel, thus adding to the cost of travel and, above all, increasing the pollution in the city.
The transport minister had said that we have plenty of water to grow sugarcane to produce ethanol. Just let him know that we are only in the month of October and Pune is going to face further water supply cuts. I dread to imagine what will happen by the time we are in April and May.
EDITOR – ASPI BHATHENA
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