Highway Robbery : Shining India Campaign, The Price People Pay

The Super Highways have been at the core of the "India Shining" campaign of the Government. However the report "Highway Robbery : Shining India Campaign and the price the people pay" by the RFSTE shows that the price people are paying for Express ways and Super Highways in terms of the social and ecological costs for out weigh the benefits a handful of elite are gaining by speedier road travel.

Contrary to what the government claims, the Highway Projects are not an indigenous, swadeshi innovation emerging from the needs and socio-economic and ecological context of India. The National Highway project is not really the symbol of indigenous development and democratic choices of the Indian people. It is driven by international financial institutions like the World Bank and ADB, who are using the expansion of highways to create markets for automobiles on one hand and privatisation of infrastructure on the other. These projects predate the NDA government. Expressways rob people of freedom and create a centralized, excluding "nationalism" for the elite and privileged.

National Highways as instruments of political control and centralized authority and exclusion were used by Hitler to create a national society "Volksgemeinschaft" connected as "one people, one Reich, one Fuhrer". The primacy to highways and automobiles is a forgetting of Gandhi's legacy of decentralization, swadeshi and inclusion of diverse cultures and plural technologies and an adoption of Hilter's dictatorship over the land and the people.

National Highways are a recipe for displacement and uprooting of people and ecosystems. The government has amended the Land Acquisition Act for acquiring land for highways which then gets privatized. A legislation on the Control of National Highways (Land and traffic) for prevention of encroachment, traffic regulation etc. on national highways has been enacted. If the Taj Express Way, which allowed Jai Prakash Industries to get hold of 600 acres in Noida for 160 km highway for highway related land grab, then for the 58,112 kms of highway the land that will be "acquired" from farmers and forests under the draconian land acquisition laws will be 217920 acres. The Highway robbery of farm lands and forests dwarfs the 15 million displacement figures since

independence. The country will be poorer by Rs. 54,000 crores which is the cost of the Highway Project. This excludes high costs of tolls and cess as highways
are privatized. Not only is peoples freedom and farmers land are being robbed by the Highway project, the project is a highway robbery of public funds.

The tragic murder of Satyendra Dubey who tried to expose the corruption linked to the World Bank financed "Golden Quandrangle" project, is just the tip of the ice berg. Justice Mishra has called it "loot and fraud in its naked form" in another case linked to highways, the "Taj Express Way". Besides Satyendra other engineers who have also been murdered due to the new "license raj" and company and contractor raj linked to highways, in the past two years are L.N. Singh, Indu Bhushan, S.C. Rai, Masood Alam Siddiqui, S.K. Bajpayee and Anwar Mehndi Rizwi.

Highways imply shifts from sustainable transport to non-sustainable movement of goods and people. The promotion of road transport will increase petrol consumption from 6 million ton to 25 million ton from the year 1997 to 2015 and diesel consumption of 30 million ton to 100 million ton from 1997 to 2015 and increase road based freight nearly 6 times. This is a recipe for increasing greenhouse gases three to four times and aggravating climate change creating more floods and droughts to more heat waves and cold waves and more deaths due to heat and cold. Compared to railways road transport generates 8 times more pollution, 10 times more land destruction, 6 times more noise pollution and 3 times more energy consumption and CO2 damage and 20 times more accident rates. Other ecological costs include water logging, blocking ground water recharge and drainage systems.

India has witnessed a population explosion of cars with automobiles jumping from 37 million in 1997 to 590 million in 2002 due to the distorted credit policies which are contributing to internal debt jumping up from Rs. 802232 crores in 1997-98 to Rs. 1752406 crores in 2001-2002. This debt is not a symbol of India Shining.

Nor are the millions of deaths due to road accidents. Road accidents have emerged as "Killer No. 1" in India accounting for 37% of all accident related deaths. India's first express way, the Mumbai-Pune Highway has turned into a killer highway. In 2003, there were 800 accident in the 90 Km stretch. The highway near Ghaziabad account for 700 lost lives in 2003. In US two people per lakh die due to road accidents, in Pakistan the figure is 32.5 per lakh and in India 140 per lakh die in road accident. India cannot be shining with the highest deaths on roads in the world. According to the Institute of Road Traffic Education around 230 deaths and 3500 injuries occur daily on India's road implying a cost of Rs. 55000 crore per year in lost lives and lost livelihoods.

Highways have also emerged as the vectors for violence against women, sex trafficking and for spreading HIV/AIDS. The estimate is that 4.52 million adults are infected with HIV / AIDS in the country, which is leading to a loss of Rs. 23500 crores to Indian economy. AIDS prevention programmes will be implemented along 7000 km of major highways.

When these high social and ecological costs are taken into account, the exclusive and obsessive focus on building super highways is not in the nations interest. What India needs is pluralism in transport and mobility with the pedestrian, the cyclist, the bullock cart, the rickshaw, the two wheeler given equal ecological space and democratic space for ensuring mobility for all, not just the car owning elite.

It is necessary that the government carries out a transparent, participatory social and ecological audit and full cost benefit analysis of the Highway Projects instead of substituting sustainable and participatory development with an advertising `on "India Shining".