Gadkari Steps In To Fix Bengaluru's Transportation Woes, Promises All Possible Support From The Centre

Union Minister Nitin Gadkari was in town yesterday. He addressed a small gathering of about fifty people in the Capitol Hotel. The interactive session on ‘Transportation Challenges in Bangalore’ organized by Rajya Sabha MP Rajeev Chandrasekhar and his foundation ‘Namma Bengaluru’ aimed at making the Union minister aware of, and to find, the best solutions to the traffic problems commoners face in the city everyday.

Bipartisanship At Its Best

Ananth Kumar, MP from South and PC Mohan, MP from Central Bengaluru, both from the BJP, were also present along with KJ George, Karnataka’s State Minister for Bengaluru Development and Town Planning, and Rajeev Gowda, Rajya Sabha MP and national Congress spokesperson. Locals who have been working hard, contributing in their own small ways to make the city better, appreciated the bonhomie between all these ministers as the issues raised cut across party lines.

Modified Suburban Rail Network

Sridhar Pabbisetty kicked off the event with a presentation detailing what ails the city and what are the bottlenecks and how it can be fixed. After him, KJ George and Ananth Kumar spoke for few minutes emphasizing the need for the city, state and central governments to work in a collaborative manner to decongest the city’s roads and solve its pollution woes.

KJ George got a big round of applause for proposing a modified suburban rail – Bengaluru’s own local train network, similar to the Mumbai one, outside the city. It’s a modified version of the original proposal which involved constructing a full network of trains crisscrossing the city which now has been junked because of the humungous costs involved in building it; close to ₹9,000 crores. Now the modified network will cost just ₹1,000 crores as it will act only as an augmenter to the Metro network, already in place. Phase 1 will connect Tumakuru to Yeshwantpur, Whitefield to Byappanahalli and Mandya to Kengeri.

Phase-1 of Metro has already covered Yeshwantpur and Byappanahalli. Kengeri will be covered under Metro Phase-II. Minister George said that Suresh Prabhu has agreed to fund 50 percent of the project and he will announce it in the upcoming railway budget.

Gadkari – Mumbai Experience

Gadkari listened patiently to both KJ George and Ananth Kumar. They presented to Gadkari a long list of demands – elevated roads and more flyovers, being prominent among them. When he got up to speak, Gadkari told the gathering that he had constructed 53 flyovers in Mumbai but the situation today is more or less the same. He suggested an approach of adopting short term, medium term, and long term goals. He asked Rajeev Chandrasekhar, BJP MPs, and Congress Govt ministers to come up with integrated transport solutions for Bengaluru in the next one month, and meet him in Delhi with the masterplan that can be prepared by roping in domain experts and crowdsourcing suggestions from all stakeholders. He assured all possible help not just from his ministry but from other ministries concerned.

The minister said that money is never a problem. He narrated an interested anecdote laced with humour:

When I decided to construct Mumbai-Pune expressway, a journalist asked me three questions – how much will it cost? how much time will it take and how much money do I have? I told him that the project time frame is two years, will cost around 2k crores, and I only have ₹10 crore. He was annoyed that I was making such tall claims when I didn’t even have the money. I will tell you what I told him. Money is not the problem. Where there is a will, there is a way, where there is no will there are only surveys, committees and discussions.

Land Acquisition – A Big Headache

Gadkari told the audience and Minister George that Land Acquisition is not only delaying the projects, it’s making them costlier as well. Perhaps he was appealing to the Congressman in him to have a relook at the Land Acquisition Act. KJ George himself had flagged the same problem earlier. The public exchequer is already cash-strapped and on top of it, land acquisition is a big headache.

Gadkari asked KJ George to study three land acquisition models – that of Amravati, Surat, and Mumbai.

Infra sops for Bengaluru

• Six-lane access-controlled Bengaluru-Mysuru highway at a cost of ₹8,000 Cr. It will be a toll road, but a service road will be built on both sides. Gadkari revealed that land acquisition is turning out to be a big problem for this corridor but he is confident that the work will start by the year-end.
• NH 209 between Bengaluru and Dindigul would be widened at an estimated cost of ₹600 Cr.
• Hoskote-Dabaspet road will be widened to four lanes at an estimated cost of ₹1,000 Cr.
• The Tumukuru-Nelamangala stretch of NH 4 will also be widened at an estimated cost of ₹2,000 Cr.
• Three factories will be setup in Bengaluru to manufacture pre-cast structures to be used in elevated corridors.

Gadkari said that reducing the cost and improving the quality are his main objectives. To achieve this, he announced he would construct concrete roads but as soon as the announcement was made, the cement industry raised the prices of cement by ₹50. He mentioned, however, that the Govt has a reserve of 90 lakh tonnes which is available at ₹120/quintal. “You (Congress State Govt) can have it”, Gadkari said. “But you will have to pay the price upfront”, he added wittily.

He mentioned the waterways project in which govt will convert 111 rivers into national waterways.

Just like we have Air Traffic Control, we will have Waterways Traffic Control to ensure smoother movement of goods and people.

The minister said that he has proposed to CM Siddaramaiah to develop such waterways in Karnataka.

Central Government Experience

Gadkari also called upon all the stakeholders to not just focus on finding out congestion points but also accident prone stretches. To address the latter, the Central Government has set aside ₹11,000 Cr.

To address the pollution menace, he suggested alternative fuel options. The government is also considering a policy to add more ethanol to fuel. He told that Scania has already given the first ethanol-driven bus to Nagpur Municipal Corporation. “We plan to have 50 more such buses,” he added. He also informed that an electric bus which uses a lithium ion battery has also been gifted to the Parliament.

I was once travelling in an electric bus in London. I asked them how much this cost and they told me that it cost somewhere around ₹1.5-2 Cr. I asked them how come it costs so much when other buses cost only ₹25-30 lakhs and they told me that these buses run on Lithium ion battery which alone costs them in the tune of ₹55 lakhs. I remembered reading that ISRO also manufactures these batteries for their use on a limited scale. I called up Annadurai for a meeting and inquired why can’t we make these batteries for cars and buses. After six months, they came up with these batteries. And today it costs us only ₹5 lakhs, not ₹55 lakhs. We plan to have many more buses running on these batteries in future.

The Minister also indicated his intentions to emulate Australia’s model of using slag to build roads. Slag is a byproduct of fuel and cement. We have mountains of waste slag lying around in our country. If Gadkari can bring technology to India and implement this model, it will not only help in constructing good roads but also in making India more swachh.

At the end of the session, he took a couple of questions from the audience. Replying to one such question on the Motor Vehicles Act, he said this act has been framed with the help of World Bank after studying the models of Brazil, USA, and Canada.

This is a very good bill. We hope it will pass in this session. Since, this comes under concurrent list, so states support is needed. I am facing stiff opposition from vested interests who are lobbying very hard to not let this act passed because it will bring more transparency.

Except when Gadkari addressed Minister KJ George as Thomas in the beginning, he hit all the right notes.

The Minister has promised a lot of things. To deliver on his promises, he will have to vigorously follow up, since the projects get stuck in an overarching bureaucracy. A collaborative effort from the city, state and central governments is a key to the successful implementation. A more clear picture will emerge in the next few months depending on the pace of execution.