India’s hi-tech city, Bengaluru, is also a metaphor for urban chaos. The city was once a peaceful abode for retired bureaucrats, with flower-bearing trees set along footpaths adding a special charm to its streets. The city grew by leaps and bounds in the past three decades on the back of the IT revolution that took the world by storm. Moving from one place to another in Bengaluru is now a huge ordeal because of the narrow roads and traffic snarls. The roads fail to cope with the heavy influx of vehicles. Today, everyone is blaming everyone else for the resultant chaos that marks the city. Business honchos are among the deeply distressed at the lack of proper urban planning and a failure on the part of successive governments to address the civic problems in a city inhabited by nearly 1.50 crore people. While Biocon chief Kiran Mazumdar Shaw was forthright in raising her concern over the city’s crumbling infrastructure, it only led to a sharp retort from deputy chief minister DK Shivakumar. The senior leader trashed business leaders with an accusation that they were having a personal agenda to target the Congress government. It is a pity that those in government fail to fathom the people’s unending struggle.
What growing cities like Bengaluru require is a mass rapid transit system like the Metro. The Namma Metro was launched in 2011 after long years of haggling and hesitation by successive state governments. After implementation of different phases, the metro system is yet to reach many parts of the sprawling city. Taking lines through the highly populated city is increasingly difficult now, though this could have been accomplished in the past with lesser effort and funds. Still, the Namma Metro is the second largest metro system, next only to that of Delhi – where too this has not been able to effectively reduce road traffic. Government policies that encourage the private vehicles market since the 1990s spelt chaos on roads in every city that mostly have old and narrow roads. Bigger cities are facing bigger problems. Bengaluru has a vehicle population of 1.25 crore; meaning one vehicle for almost every individual. Some 3000 vehicles are getting registered there every day. This could only worsen the present plight of the city as the infrastructural development for Bengaluru, or any city for that matter, never ever kept pace with the huge growth in population.
Governments sat back and blinked. However, the national highway development has been fast-paced after its good start by the Atal Behari Vajpayee government and this was continued by the UPA and NDA governments. Cities would have breathed easy had the metro rail systems been introduced in a more energetic manner. After the start of the Calcutta Metro system in the 1980s, there was a perceptible drag vis-à-vis its introduction in other cities. Delhi embraced it in the 1990s, while Mumbai initiated the project in 2014 — three years after Bengaluru took to it. As of now, the total number of metro rail systems is just 18.
Read more on The Shillong Times
