Volume 27 - Issue 14 :: Jul.

03-
• Contents
16, 2010
INDIA'S NATIONAL MAGAZINE
from the publishers of THE HINDU

COLUMN

Long road ahead

BHASKAR GHOSE
The Union government promises roads, but it has yet
to find a Chairman for the National Highways
Authority of India.
R.M. RAJARATHINAM

WORK UNDER WAY on the four-lane highway near

Ariyamangalam in Tiruchi, Tamil Nadu. A 2009 picture.

THE United Progressive Alliance government, like its first

avatar and the National Democratic Alliance (NDA)
government before it, professes great concern for the
building of highways and roads, seeing them, quite rightly,
as drivers of economic development. But the record of the
Ministry of Road Transport & Highways in the first UPA
government was disappointing, to put it mildly, under the
stewardship of T.R. Baalu, who changed the Chairman of the
National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) frequently.
The present Minister, Kamal Nath, has made brave promises
about the thousands of kilometres of highways he plans to
build every year, but one has to see how much of those
thousands will actually come up. More importantly,
questions still remain about the quality and standards of the
highways. Will they become the pot-holed disasters one is
so familiar with after every monsoon, when the only vehicles
that can negotiate them are SUVs, as used in the hinterland
of Africa? Or will they be reasonably well-constructed roads
that can withstand the rains and, more to the point, the
heavily overloaded trucks that use them?

From what one has been able to gather, the Golden

Quadrilateral, the very first of the projects to have been
undertaken by the NDA government, is still to be completed.
There is a stretch of some 10 miles (16 kilometres) or so in
Bihar where land acquisition has still not been done or
where there is some impediment to the work. Facile
explanations are given, for example, that 97.6 per cent of
the work has been completed. The question is, Has the
project been completed or not? The simple answer is no.

Apart from these questions something else is stirring in the

NHAI and it concerns the selection of the Chairman. The
Minister in the previous government could change the
Chairman because at that time the Chairman was nominated
by the Government of India. Such appointments must never
be left to the government, which means the Minister, and
especially so in a coalition government, where one of the
main tasks of the Prime Minister is to keep the coalition
partners pleased. (If while doing so he also gets in a bit of
good governance, so much the better.)

The Inter-Ministerial Committee of Parliament (IMC) set up

to examine the working of the NHAI recommended that a
search committee be set up to select persons suitable for
the post of Chairman of the NHAI, and this was done.
Despite the IMC's recommendation that the retirement age
of the Chairman be 62 years, somewhere along the way it
was changed to 65 years, and that was when the fun and
games started.

L. BALACHANDAR
THE POT-HOLED NATIONAL Highway 210 near Tiruchi.

The first search committee was scrapped on the grounds

that it did not have the right people in it, and the second
had to be scrapped because it was discovered that one of
the applicants was himself a member of the search
committee. Another applicant, it turned out, was the
Secretary of the Ministry, the very person whose
responsibility it is to process the recommendations of the
search committee. To date no new search committee has
been formed, and it is not clear whether the two gentlemen
in question have withdrawn their applications or been
disqualified.

Going a little beyond the bizarre facts, one needs to ask why
there is this frenzied desire to get this post. It is unlikely
that any of those who applied were motivated by a genuine
anxiety to transform the state of India's road system, build
world-class highways and take India into a new era of
economic prosperity. As far as the civil servants who applied
are concerned, their eagerness is easily explained. They get
five more years of service, that is, five more years in which
they can enjoy the consequence and the self-importance of
a government post.

What about the others who have applied? Some of them

may know something of how the NHAI works, but none of
them is known to be a distinguished technocrat like E.
Sreedharan, who won his laurels by building the Konkan
Railway and who is now the Managing Director of Delhi
Metro, which he built into one of the finest metro systems in
the world. These applicants have not done anything to draw
the admiring attention of people; good journeyman
technocrats is what they are. So why do they want a job
that may well be more taxing than the ones handled by
Sreedharan? Clearly, for roughly the same reasons as the
civil servants and, dare one say it, because they know where
the loopholes in the various systems are. Some of the
loopholes were outlined in a poignant letter that the late
S.K. Dubey wrote to the Prime Minister, but these were at a
relatively low level; there must be many more loopholes
higher up the ladder. The hopefuls may well use this
knowledge to plug the loopholes, which would be a good
thing. But one wonders whether their eagerness for the job
is indeed to plug those loopholes and ensure transparency in
all of the NHAI's dealings.

One thing is clear. One does not need a civil servant as

Chairman. Civil servants simply do not know how highways
are built, where the systems need to be altered, improved or
replaced altogether. A Chairman must have been involved at
some stage in the actual building of a road. Sitting in an
office with spreadsheets and statistics is no substitute.

So if it has to be a technocrat, how does one get someone

like Sreedharan? The only way is to look at the applicants'
track records and pick the one who has the best. A rigorous
scrutiny of the background of each short-listed candidate for
honesty is essential, but is something that is almost never
done, and those with the slightest odour of something
dubious about them must be rejected immediately.

Going a little further, one must consider the manner in

which appointments to key positions are made. As in this
case, the absolute discretion of Ministers must be removed
and replaced with a system in which they are just a part of
the selection process and cannot in any circumstances have
lawfully appointed incumbents removed only because they
do not want them there. True, the Minister is accountable to
Parliament, but accountability in the political discourse has
been redefined successfully and the argument no longer
holds water.

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