Any resident of NCR will find that transit to the nearest colony will take minimum 40 minutes and a maximum three hours during peak hours and seven hours or more when it rains heavily, as in Gurugram the other day. Surely travel by tonga in an earlier era was much faster!
The rate of growth of vehicular traffic is 13 per cent per annum and surface roads in metropolitan areas have grown at less than 1 per cent per annum. The mismatch in traffic patterns will be obvious to a high school math student but it is apparently incomprehensible to policy makers. Starting with the Rajiv Gandhi initiative of constructing flyovers in the 1980s, the investment in road infrastructure in Delhi has been the highest, however, the feverish pace of traffic increment has overtaken this. Sreedharan constructed the first Delhi Metro routes in the 1990s in five years. Each new extension now takes over 10 years, leading to massive road blocks.
To add to the citizens’ woes, Delhi now has the distinction of being the most polluted city. Apparently the ministries dealing with environment, taxation, industrial production, urban planning, and others see no need to address the issue, or to coordinate. In this territory where ‘angels’ fear to tread, it is left to our knight in shining armour, the super-CM Arvind Kejriwal, to jump into the fray, purely for immediate political gains to introduce the ‘odd-even’ concept, which is at best a temporary palliative; even he has realised that he will receive more black eyes than kudos.
If this is the situation of the national capital, one can imagine the plight of other metros and smaller towns.