MANAN VATSYAYANA/AFP

A traffic jam at the new Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) corridor in New Delhi on April 23.

THE people of this country are an amazingly forgiving and patient lot. From the time that efforts began to develop the country, an innumerable number of the most dreadful mistakes have been made, resulting in chaos and a total waste of public funds. Bridges have either collapsed or been built in the wrong place; buildings have begun to fall apart from the moment they were declared to have been completed; primary health centres were just shells with nothing in them, certain ly not doctors and nurses; primary schools were sheds or garage-like structures often with no doors and no furniture and sometimes with non-existent staff – who were just names in a register against which salaries were collected every month.

Of course, it is not all like that. There are examples of actual work getting done, of functioning health centres and schools, bridges in the right places, and so on, but there is no doubt that, on the whole, the development effort has been less than satisfactory. And it is not as if our policymakers are unaware of this. From the Prime Minister down, virtually everyone has been stressing the need for improved administrative systems.

Initially, the mistakes could have been put down to inexperience, to a need to impress one’s senior officers, and the need – an inexplicably obsessive one – to spend the money allotted without bothering to see whether the spending is worthwhile. One would have thought that by now, 60 years after Independence, some methods would have been put in place and some rationality brought into the planning and execution of projects. This clearly, and tragically, is not the case in areas where it matters the most.

Consider the power sector. To underestimate the demand in the first few years can be forgiven but to do so consistently is nothing short of criminal. The projects that are being taken up seem to have been selected without any studies being carried out and, if they are, the persons involved are obviously monumentally incompetent. Take the case of the hydroelectric power station on the Sutlej river at Nathpa Jhakri in Himachal Pradesh. This project is meant to generate 1,500 megawatt of power in its first stage, but from its first year of operation has operated only fitfully and never at full power. The reason? The water is laden with too much silt, and even boulders, that could damage the turbines, and so the power station has had to be shut down.

When one considers the amount of money this project has consumed – Rs.8,000 crore? – it is reasonable to assume that studies were carried out on the levels of silt and other material in the river as it comes down from its Himalayan heights. Studies will no doubt be made available, but what cannot be explained away is why the project was located where it was. Why was it even taken up before the silt issue was resolved?

One hears that because of a lack of planning the Bhakra Dam is silting up much faster than it was supposed to. The dam was built in the late 1950s, and the engineers may well have made some mistakes and may not have taken all factors into account. After all, there were no computers then, and every calculation had to be made manually. But the planners responsible for Nathpa Jhakri do not have this excuse to hide behind. They are guilty of having wasted public funds by not basing their plans on reliable and credible data.

The latest example of this is the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) project to improve traffic movement in New Delhi. The term, in effect, means that on the road there are two lanes exclusively for buses, with bus stops at different places, and buses move at around 35 kmph on these lanes while the other traffic moves on either side of them. Such systems are known to work in Bogota, Colombia, in Ottawa, Canada, and in some other places.

It does not require a specialist in traffic engineering to realise that this system will not work in New Delhi, where drivers obey only such rules as they wish to and where there is not just a bewildering variety in the kinds of road users – from the latest cars to bullock carts to cycle rickshaws and elephants – but where there are no pavements or real pedestrian crossings so that pedestrians swarm across the roads, some running, others ambling across with a hand raised. This does not, one can safely say, hold good for Bogota and Ottawa.

What is worse is that right from the start the traffic police were against this system. But the Delhi government was adamant, and with the help of some academics from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, rolled out the BRT on one of the busiest roads in the capital. Even advocates of the system had doubts whether it would work on an existing road, but the authorities went ahead anyway.

The result has been utter chaos. Traffic has backed up well past the starting point of this misbegotten scheme; bus passengers do not seem to know how to get across the road from the bus stops in the middle; the untameable Delhi drivers have crossed over the markers on to the bus lanes; and buses, including those in the dedicated bus lanes, have broken down.

Now, about a week after the system started, there are claims that it is beginning to show improvements. It would as drivers are avoiding that road and using other roads, which as a result are becoming prone to huge traffic jams.

All this raises basic and alarming questions about the ability of those in authority to make rational, practical decisions. Only a very few can: E. Sreedharan, who set up the Delhi Metro, clearly can; Verghese Kurien obviously could; M.S. Swaminathan obviously could. But there must be more such people if India is to go forward and develop its infrastructure, its agriculture and its health and educational systems. We have had no visionaries, like the people I have mentioned, in the fields of health or education, which is why these sectors continue to remain in the terrible condition they are in today. We have no such person in the field of power, and so even in the 21st century, most of India is terribly short of power, and there is little likelihood of the situation improving dramatically in the next decade.

But what we really lack, it is clear, are rational, focussed, intelligent decision makers in the public domain. There are enough in the private sector to build factories, airports and even highways and expressways, but they seem to be virtually non-existent in the state machinery. This is such a serious situation that it would be well worth the Prime Minister’s setting aside other work and doing some hard, out-of-the-box thinking about ways by which gifted planners, administrators and engineers could be brought in to take on the huge task of developing the infrastructure of the country – the physical and the social. Administrative reform commissions will not do. They only produce learned reports. Blueprints for immediate action have to be drawn up, tearing down the structures that generations of devoted bureaucrats have preserved to ensure their supremacy over all systems.

If this is taken in hand, even now, it will mean one major step towards a real transformation of the country. If it is not, well, there are all those bridges built with no roads leading to them, the health centres with no staff or equipment, schools with no buildings or teachers, there is Nathpa Jhakri, and there is the BRT traffic mess in Delhi to show us what lies ahead.