The Car, The Road, And The Chacha

Our great and glorious leader, Chacha Manmohan S Gandhi, freshly returned from Russia with more nuclear technology, is now off to Copenhagen, to demonstrate his faux concern for the polar bear. All this, while parliament is in session.

In the meantime, one of our leading editors has expressed his skepticism towards the claims of the climate change wallahs: Jug Suraiya’s “A Convenient Lie” takes a huge swipe at Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. LRC too has a great piece against this non-science, here.

However, today I would like to examine Chacha’s role as Central Planner. In this connection, there is news that a 61% jump in car sales occurred this last month, November, as compared to the same month last year. Total car sales are expected to cross 1.8 million units this year. Next year, the figure should cross 2 million, analysts say.

I wonder how many cars sold every year in India when Chacha headed the Planning Commission in the early 80s. If memory serves, before Maruti, barely 20,000 cars sold in India every year. From 20,000 to 20,00,000 is a hundred-fold jump!

But our Chacha and his planners see it not.

They never planned for roads. It was Vajpayee who inaugurated the idea – and the Congress ignored it.

Today, Mint is carrying a report that says that over 30% of road projects are delayed because of various reasons – not land acquisition. The reasons for these delays are:

The disputes have arisen due to reasons like input cost escalation, royalty charges on minerals, entry tax and removal of public utilities on acquired land for road construction.

“Very few cases are stuck over problems relating to land acquisition,” a senior government official is quoted as saying.

So it is NOT land acquisition that is holding up roadwork; it is poor administration. Our The State and its NHAI are to blame.

Meanwhile, Mint also reports:

The government on Tuesday came out with the first batch of supplementary demands for grants in the Lok Sabha seeking to raise public expenditure by an additional Rs25,725 crore during the current fiscal.

This includes "equity infusion" into the “ailing” NACIL. In case you don’t know what NACIL is – it is the holding company for Air India.

Chacha and Co. are blowing up our money on everything except roads.

I have been writing about roads for more than 15 years now. At least I saw it coming. As did most people – except for the deaf, dumb and blind morons on Laputa.

And I wrote on the automobile revolution over a year ago – it was my first column in Mint, and you can read that here.

I also wrote a recent column on the importance of roads, which you can find here.

What more is there for me to say?

Except that the critical function of any “planner” is to think ahead. I give Chacha a Big Zero on this score.