These days I spend a lot of time driving to and fro Gurgaon. It takes me about 35 minutes to cover a 30km stretch from home to Gurgaon, and then another 40 minutes to get to the office building in Gurgaon (a distance of some 2 kms). And this is no matter what time I leave home (I've tried 30 minute intervals starting 7:30 am to 9am). The reason is quite silly - there is one particular stretch of road which is all broken down and frequently gets waterlogged, stopping all flow of traffic on it.
Another time I was stuck at the airport in Mumbai for over 12 hours, not able to fly out as Indian flights were not leaving due to low visibility, and not able to leave the airport because the access road was totally under water and no vehicle could pass (this was quite an experience and probably deserves a blog post of its own!!)
I do feel quite often that infrastructure in Delhi has improved by leaps and bounds. Travelling on the newly done up NH8 is quite a pleasure! But even this 8 lane expressway gets bottlenecked each morning and evening, due to a very very silly reason - a couple of toll gates bang at the mouth of the expressway(operated manually, and with no system for disaggregation of commercial vehicles and other vehicles).
I'm quite optimistic about infrastructure in India in general. For example, I find the Metro quite convenient and comfortable to travel in Delhi. I find the new airport terminal for private airlines in Bombay also quite easy to navigate. What I don't get though is the 'last mile' or last detail lapses that skew the experience so much. I wonder why we are poor as a nation in designing systems? I can confidently assert that the average Indian is smarter than the average Japanese, but Japanese systems are far superior to ours. Perhaps it has to do with our education - we learn more theory and less application based stuff (at least that's what I felt all through till I went to IIT).
I'm sure all these niggling lapses will eventually be sorted out. What I'm not sure about is when this will happen? And what can I do to expedite the process??
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4 comments:
On the part about Gurgaon trip being a full of bottlenecks ... i guess kashew too had poured out his angst about this in one of his post (which was very long so i read only parts of it ... he appeared to suggest some solution to the problem)
On the more important part about systems ... I wonder if the move towards more practical(and working) systems should begin by having the right "decision making process" - Maybe starting off with the top decision makers (executive and legislative heads, councils and assemblies etc) making decisions based on fair and pre-declared principles, supported by actual numbers and facts ... and backed by rationality ...working towards greater public good.
The current political realities may disallow all decision making to be of the kind described above ... but if most non-controversial decisions are taken in the above manner... they will lead to a day when controversial decisions will also stand some public scrutiny (at least would be transparent enough to reveal the biases on which they were taken)
The above was the top down approach. I don't think that there could be an easy bottoms-up approach because in most places, except perhaps in item-number videos, bottoms don't matter much.
There could definitely be a middle-up approach in which success of a lot of projects like "Delhi Metro" force all powers-that-be to take the right decisions and deliver similar success .
Hey Alam is right I got so frustarted that I wrote a long mail to NHAI board, I was also thinking of forming a yahoo group or something where we can share such things and put pressure on local authorities to do something by writing a collective mail or swamping them with emails or something. Now that you are also in delhi and so is Alam may be we should do something about it - something like the citizen's forum in B'lore (don't remember the name but the founder was once invited to the campus by RTK - i think it was janagrah or something..)
Nishant, the organization you are referring to is Janagraha indeed. Founder is Ramesh Ramanathan. He also wtites a weekly column in Mint - Mobius Strip- that can be accesssed online on both Mint's as well as Janagraha's site. The column is quite well written and Janagraha's website is very informative (also inspiring) about the small steps they are taking to to make the citizen's movement stronger and more effective. Unfortunately, their work is largely limited to Blore as of now.
Yeah I am aware that janagrah is limited to B'lore only, but why can't some of us pull a similar thing off in Delhi?
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