Consider the following scenarios, each followed by a question, and think what the answers should be: Example 1: The examination date has been announced, scheduled to be held three months later. What should the students do? Should they wait to write the examination and then start preparing for it? Or should they prepare for it ahead of the exams to ensure they do well in it?
Example 2: A team of surgeons is preparing to perform an open-heart surgery on a patient. Does the team ask the patient to come directly to the operation theatre to undergo the surgery? Or does the team get the patient admitted to the hospital in advance to conduct pre-surgery tests to ensure that the latter’s parameters are normal to endure the complex operation?
Example 3: You organize a party. You invite a hundred guests to arrive at a particular place on a particular date and time. Do you wait for the guests to arrive and then decide on the combination of food and drink? Or do you keep it ready in advance by knowing the preferences of your guests so that everyone has a good time?
The fourth example is a real one: The Karnataka government is looking at adding more roads in Bengaluru – including the ambitious tunnel roads and flyovers – to accommodate the burgeoning Bengaluru traffic. With rampant indiscipline on the city’s roads, should more roads be added to encourage more private vehicles driven without discipline? Or should existing rules be enforced strictly first – to deter motorists from breaking rules – before adding more road space to the city?
This question completely bypasses the other issue of whether tunnel roads and flyovers would impact the urban environment. It simply draws attention to a simple logic that when a solution for a problem is sought – in this case, adding more road space to the city to decongest the city – that solution should end the problem of congestion rather than turn into a harbinger of worse congestion ahead.
This is the larger issue than the recently withdrawn Karnataka Government Parks (Preservation) (Amendment) Bill, 2026, which proposed to allow 5% of government park and garden land to be alienated for public infrastructure projects – firmly linked to the now-shelved plan of boring a tunnel road from under the heritage Lal Bagh Gardens in South Bengaluru. The state government’s withdrawal of the Bill may have appeared like a major victory for those who opposed it while fearing its negative impact on the part of Lal Bagh. The shelved plan involved boring a tunnel through a part of the Peninsular Gneiss, the ancient rock system found across South India, famously exposed above the surface at the heritage garden in Bengaluru.
There is no part of the city where traffic violations are not committed by the minute, and it is no great revelation that much of Bengaluru’s traffic woes were due to lack of discipline among the motorists. While this prevails unabated, the initial phase of Bengaluru’s planned tunnel road project involves connecting Hebbal to Central Silk Board, a length of 17 Km designed as a twin-tube system; even as it is proposed to have a long-term plan of expanding the network to over 46 Km.
On June 28, despite wide opposition to the project, Chief Minister DK Shivakumar lay the foundation stone for the 2.18 Km short tunnel between Hebbal junction and the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) estimated to cost about Rs 1,139 crore. The overall tunnel road project is estimated to cost over Rs 17,000 crore.
In May 2023, even before the tunnel road project was announced, the Bengaluru-based think-tank, Centre for Study of Science, Technology and Policy (CSTEP), had projected that the city’s active on-road vehicle population would grow by 1.5 times, rising from an estimated average of 57 lakh then to 89 lakh by 2030. These figures pertain only to the “active on-road vehicle population” – the total number of vehicles running on the city roads at a given time – while the cumulative registrations recorded by the transport department have already crossed 1.28 crore, with 2,100 new vehicles getting registered daily at the various regional transport offices in Bengaluru!
Adding more roads would only encourage people to buy new private vehicles to use those roads, especially in the Indian society where owning a car is a major status symbol.
There is no point in blaming the roads when it is the lack of safe driving skills and discipline to be blamed, which can be corrected only through stringent enforcement of the rules acting as deterrence to erring motorists. The situation can be aptly described using the famous Kannada adage: “Kuniyalaradavalige nela donku” (“A person who does not know how to dance says the floor is uneven”).
Basically, roads will always be blamed, because the common motorist has failed to learn how to drive in a disciplined manner. It’s time to think of easier, quicker and simpler alternatives. Think about cycles, public transport and metro network expansion as solutions. They are better for Namma Bengaluru’s health and environment.