Nov 16,1998

With a few exceptions, the lifelines of the economy are no more than dirt tracks masquerading as roads. Can the Government find the money to improve them?

By Sumit Mitra

Officials at Hyundai and Daewoo Motors are busy counting the money from bookings of the small cars they have recently introduced in the Indian market. At truck manufacturer Telco there are sighs of relief. The September 1998 sales figures, though 20 per cent lower than last year, are an improvement over the 28 per cent drop in August-to-August sales. Estimates are that this year, with the influx of these new cars and with the revival of the commercial vehicles sector, two lakh more vehicles will hit Indian roads. Roads, what roads?

India is fast approaching a road famine. Only half of its total 2.03 million km of road length is surfaced. And only half of this surfaced length is motorable, the rest potholed and cratered dirt tracks masquerading as roads. Besides, "motorability" is also defined by traffic density.

Along the 38,500 km of centrally-maintained national highways, the volume of trucks, tractors, buses and cars is growing at a breathtaking pace. With the axiom that the tonnage on road grows twice as fast as the economy, the traffic growth has ranged between 10 per cent and 12 per cent in each of the past seven post-reform years. The number of vehicles on the roads has grown from three lakh in 1950 to three crore now. The weight of freight moved by road has jumped 88 times in this period, and the number of passengers has leapfrogged 70 times. On the "Golden Quadrilateral" -- the 5,871-km network of national highways (see diagram) that connect the four metros -- no more than 20,000 vehicles passed each day till the early '90s. The number exceeds 38,000 now.

In the early '60s, a truck covered the 934-km distance between Delhi and Ahmedabad in 24 hours. But trucking company Jaipur Golden set a time limit of 32 hours when it began a Delhi-Ahmedabad service in 1962, giving its drivers an additional eight hours to cover delays caused by unforeseen circumstances. The single-lane highway has since been widened to two lanes -- and even four lanes in many parts -- but Jaipur Golden drivers now have 50 hours to cover the same distance. Says J.L. Khanna, a director of the company: "The road has become so congested that we don't have the heart to penalise the driver for delay unless we have proof that it was deliberate."

Under the growing load of traffic, roads are getting pulverised, cratered and for long stretches reduced to mere dirt tracks. On the busier sections where the roads are still single-lane (3.25 m wide with a 2.5 m shoulder on either side) or double-lane (7 m), traffic jams can stretch up to 10 km. On the Ahme-dabad-Limbdi section of NH-8, truck drivers invariably doze off when caught in traffic snarls that occur at least twice a day. Meat exporters from Kanpur, who route their consignment to Mumbai port through a stretch of the famous Grand Trunk Road (NH-2), are now paying a high premium for container refrigeration. The cooling plant must keep going even when the truck is caught in a jam and the engine stalls.

A bigger problem is posed by the rapid deterioration of the road-top, or the macadam, which is stingily built. According to a 1995 World Bank study, only 4 per cent of the two-lane roads (and none of the intermediate and single-lane ones) have internationally accepted quality of structural condition and pavement formation.

The shipment delay, and the cost of vehicular damage because of poorly maintained roads, are pushing up transportation costs to unsustainable levels. The cost of moving a container by road from Delhi to Mumbai, for example, is now as much as 55 per cent of the road-and-sea freight from Delhi to Hamburg. The delay factor has reduced the number of commercial trips a truck can make. So the trucker must push up freight charges to meet his capital cost and maintain the rate of return. The wear and tear of vehicles on the other hand is expediting the ageing of vehicles and depressing prices in the second-hand truck market. Till a few years ago, a 9-tonne Tata truck fetched almost the same price as a new one even after 2,00,000 km of use. Now a fourth of the price is shaved off after that much use. Imtiaz Ali, who finances second-hand trucks, says that "demand has evaporated" because, after a year of use, "the maintenance cost becomes too high".

The national highway network added 4,169 km to its length last year as the state governments began handing over highways under their charge to the Centre. In the current fiscal, another 11,024 km of such roads are to be added to the national highway system, making it longer than 50,000 km. However, even the national highway is an apology for an arterial network. It is single-lane for 11,344 km, or 29.5 per cent of its length. The length of four-lane corridors is a pathetic 878 km. The newly-built four-lane corridor between Delhi and Agra -- though a vast improvement on the narrow and potholed road of the past -- is nowhere near the standards of the western freeways. The paved area is not fenced. It is a walking track for herds of cattle in the mornings and evenings. Fast traffic gets clogged by slow-moving armies of tractors carrying huge stacks of grain. In a country like India which has vast plains, the railways should have carried most of freight and passenger traffic since it was a cheaper mode of transport. But the growth of the railways has lagged so far behind that, as a Ministry of Surface Transport (most) survey showed in 1995, the share of roads in the total movement of freight has risen to 60 per cent while that of passengers has gone up to 80 per cent. The share of roads is expected to rise further in the coming years.

With traffic volume increasing, the Congress government of Narasimha Rao first mooted the idea of "super-national highways", or toll expressways, to be built de novo on new alignments. It was the brainchild of Jagdish Tytler, the then surface transport minister. But the Rao cabinet found the idea of new alignment too expensive. While the cost of turning a two-lane road into a four-lane one was around Rs 3 crore per km then, that of building expressways on a new alignment (with underpasses) worked out to a prohibitive Rs 12 crore per km. To recover the cost from users over 20 years, the toll per user (average of all vehicles) would have been a staggering Rs 40 per km.

The Government has since dropped the ambitious plan of building new roads and is instead trying to address the more immediate problem of four-laning about 14,000 km of the most used parts of the national highways, and of two-laning the single-lane corridors. But as J.B. Mathur, chief engineer (roads) in most, explains, the current cost of four-laning a two-lane road is Rs 4 crore per km. This excludes the cost of land acquisition, if that is needed, in stretches where the Government doesn't have the full right of way. The total cost was calculated by most at Rs 80,000 crore. A working group recommended last year that out of this amount, Rs 23,000 crore be spent during the Ninth Plan (1997-2002). But the flow of funds has remained sticky. Says Surface Transport Secretary

R.D. Vasudevan: "Going by the rate of existing flow of funds, we'll end up with only Rs 12,000 crore during the Ninth Plan."

Let alone funds for road widening, there isn't enough money even for routine maintenance. most and the Finance Commission had jointly agreed on a maintenance spending of Rs 2 lakh per km annually for the national highway network. Adjusted for road width and other parameters, it means an expenditure of Rs 800 crore. But only Rs 496 crore were available under this head last year.

That's sad because maintenance holds the key to a road's structural quality, and therefore its capacity to withstand traffic. most engineers privately admit that the maintenance work is a farce. While a durable macadam of bitumen and concrete with a life span of at least seven years calls for the deployment of sophisticated "pavers", the niggardly funds of the cpwd do not allow more than a thin surface dressing costing less than Rs 50,000 per km. Even then, the full stretch of the road under repair is not covered. Mathur says the insufficient maintenance leads to a "vicious cycle". As the uncovered portion cracks up, the gaps are filled with rain water and moisture travels beneath the road to form bubbles that force their way up the pavement, thus carrying the damage further down.

Of late, however, the Centre has woken up to the main problem in improving roads. New measures are being taken to encourage private capital in the road sector. The National Highways Act, 1956, was amended in 1995 to make land acquisition easier. The National Highways Authority Act, 1988, was made functional in 1995, mandating the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) primarily for four-laning of the Golden Quadrilateral. The Highways Deve-lopment Policy of the Atal Bihari Vajpayee Government allows a 40 per cent government grant to private road builders on the construction cost. The contracts are to be awarded on build-operate-transfer (BOT) basis. Private investors have also been offered concessions for developing real estate along the highways. The cost of land acquisition for the construction of roads, bypasses or bridges is to be borne entirely by the Government.

Vasudevan thinks that the private sector will provide "at least 30 per cent" of the capital required for the road improvement programme. But the response from the private sector has so far been tepid. Only 11 bot projects have been awarded so far. The largest of these -- the 6 km Narmada Bridge in Gujarat awarded to L&T -- is worth only Rs 113 crore. Private capital shies away from road building because of the long lead time, the consequent risk of cost overruns, and the political and social risks in collecting toll charges.

Prime Minister Vajpayee recently announced a scheme to stretch the Golden Quadrilateral in four directions -- to Kashmir, Kanyakumari, Kutch and Silchar. He also proposed a dream six-lane national expressway connecting Amritsar to Kanyakumari and Mumbai to Calcutta. The Maharashtra and Karnataka governments have taken the lead by developing the Mumbai-Pune and Bangalore-Mysore expressways. The NHAI has finalised a model concession agreement. It has also opened the first toll highway section in the country in the Kotputli-Amer section of NH-8.

These are but glimpses of modernity which the government is showcasing to invite private sector investment. But it is clear that the private entrepreneur will remain hesitant to invest in this sector and it will remain the responsibility of the state to keep the nation moving.

© Living Media India Ltd