Last week I spent a morning exercising my right to information. What happened is a sideshow to the subject I write about this week, but I share it with you so you understand that this new right is as meaningless as the right to primary education that every Indian child supposedly has.Before writing this piece I needed to know how many kilometres of road are being built daily since the fall of the Vajpayee government. They claimed they were building 11 kilometres a day and I wanted to know if this was still the pace of highway development.So I called the Minister of Surface Transport, T R Baalu. He was on tour but his personal assistant said I could get the information from the Director General, Road Transport. He was also on tour but his office said I could get the information from the Additional Director General. He was in a meeting but his secretary said I could get the information from the Chief Engineer of the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI), Shri R K Singh. When I called him I managed a slightly longer conversation with factotum who answered the phone because of insisting firmly that there was now a Right to Information Act and I was a journalist. ‘‘Just a minute,’’ said factotum as I overheard him say to his boss ‘‘there’s this journalist who insists on talking to you, she wants some information.’’Telephone conversations are clearly heard these days so I heard Mr Singh say, ‘‘Tell her to call Atul Kumar, give her the mobile number. Tell her I’m not available.’’ I called Atul Kumar’s mobile number and got his message service so I tried the landline and was told that he was also on tour and I should call the General Manager of the NHAI, Mr Venkataraman. My search for information ended with ‘‘sorry extension 1104 is either busy or not answering just now, please try again later.’’ By this time more than an hour had gone by and my deadline was beginning to make urgent demands so I gave up my quest. It needs to be said here that in Vajpayee’s time the Ministry of Surface Transport worked with military efficiency. There was a retired General in charge and he was determined that the highways the Prime Minister ordered him to build would be built on a war footing.Since I failed to exercise my right to information I cannot tell you how many kilometres of road a day we are building now, but as a frequent road traveller I can tell you that the war footing has gone. This is sad because the change a road brings is often the difference between extreme poverty and nascent prosperity and roads, in the end, are things that cannot be built unless the government of the day wants them built. To quote from Jeffrey Sachs’ new book, The End of Poverty, ‘‘It (government) must identify and finance the high-priority infrastructure projects, and make the needed infrastructure and social services available to the whole population, not just a select few.’’The rich need infrastructure too but when the government does not build it they can manage. Where there is no power they build their own supply, where there are no roads they use private planes and helicopters and where there is no clean water they purify their own. It is for those who live in extreme poverty that a road can make the difference between subsistence and opportunity and if the Vajpayee government understood nothing else it understood this. It would be a monumental tragedy if the Sonia-Manmohan government slowed down the highway programme just because it is associated with the last Prime Minister.For a government that claims to speak for the aam aadmi, it seems extraordinary that nobody at the top appears to have realised the importance of roads in the fight against extreme poverty. Wherever you see extreme poverty in India, wherever you see people living below the poverty line, you will notice that it is in villages to which there are no roads.Last week I happened to drive from Mumbai to Gujarat on one of the new highways. Till it was built last year the journey used to take between six and seven hours. It took me three hours and the pace at which we drove made me forget more than once that I was driving through rural India in a region so backward that till not long ago village living standards were primitive. Local people told me that men used to wander around in grimy loincloths and the women were lucky to be able to afford a single sari. Nobody could afford shoes or consumer goods of any kind. I found this hard to believe as I drove past pretty, little towns with buildings and bazaars so shiny and new they seemed to have come up at the same time as the new road.In Nandurbar, last year, I saw the lives of starving babies saved because a road made it possible to bring them to the nearest town for treatment. Our government with a ‘‘human face’’ has spent the past year coming up with grandiose schemes to guarantee rural employment and dangerous schemes to distribute forest land to Adivasis apparently without realising that the best anti-poverty measure is to build the highways.Let me clarify that I am not saying that the programme has been stopped altogether. I am only saying that the urgency seems to have gone. There would not have been urgency under the last government either had the Prime Minister not made it clear that the highways were something he was personally interested in. Perhaps, the missing ingredient at the moment is political will and without this it is only a matter of time before we return to the bad old days of building roads at the pace of 11 kilometres a year. If my attempt to get information out of the Ministry of Surface Transport is anything to go by then the bad old days are already back.Write to tavleensingh@expressindia.com
