On The Right To A Road

Feliciano Dias occupies prime beachside property quite close to where I stay. Not only that, he has invested in setting up rooms for tourists, complete with a kitchen equipped with a refrigerator. He has thus mixed not only his labour, but also his Capital, with the nature-given Property – and therefore deserves all the rights that should go with it.

Feliciano’s tragedy is that few come to occupy his rooms. And all this has to do with access to his property – roads.

Patnem Beach lies directly west of Feliciano’s property – but there is no direct access. The beach, which is public property, and where his potential customers are located, is barely 15 metres from his west-facing tourist rooms – but the pathway is blocked by two low walls that his neighbour has built. Few come to occupy rooms that require you to climb walls to access them.

But the situation from the east is not much better, the direction by which Feliciano must access the main Patnem-Colomb Road, the road by which he takes his children to school, his wife to The Market, the road by which he accesses all other services ranging from the doctor to the feni supplier. Feliciano does not have proper access to this road either.

Whereas his neighbour has a broad road linking the main road to his property, for poor Feliciano there is just a very narrow and winding pathway, through which a man can barely pass, and through which he squeezes in and out on his 100cc motorcycle. A bigger motorcycle might not have made it.

But why talk of a bigger motorcycle – even a coffin could not make it. Speaking to me the other day, Feliciano and his wife Janet lamented the fact that, if either of them were to die, a coffin with four pall-bearers would not be able to exit their Property. So Feliciano cannot live on his Property; he cannot die on it either.

What is the solution?

To my mind, this requires application of the “common law right to an access road” at the level of the local government. When I read Gabriel Roth’s excellent new book on roads, Street Smart, I discovered that such a right is indeed in force in New Zealand, a primarily agricultural economy, because of which over 75 per cent of their road network is owned and managed by local governments. Such a solution has to be applied in India.

I told Feliciano that my message to all the people of India is simply this:

=> We don’t need government “education,” which is mere propaganda, harmful for the mind
=> We don’t need government employment guarantees; rather we need Liberty to carry out all our trades
=> We don’t need government ration shops; we’d rather buy all our needs from shopkeepers in The Market

What We Need Are Roads

Without roads, you cannot access The Market, and neither can The Market access you.

Feliciano Dias’ case shows how important roads are. This must be the situation of millions and millions of Indians. Without roads, they will be poor forever.

Roads matter.

They should be Top Priority.

And, at the level of each local government, there should be a district roads engineer to implement the “common law right to an access road” for all occupiers of Property. This should be the basic Law of the Land, and the First Duty of the Local Government.