Expressway or Suppressway?

Expressway/Suppressway
Why does the Congress leadership allow its Karnataka CM to stall a project of its earlier govt?
Shekhar Gupta, The Indian Express

Work on the Mysore-Bangalore expressway has again been stalled by a stay order from the Supreme Court. Bangalore is already choking because of inadequate urban infrastructure. One important avenue of progress is if high quality roads and telecom could fan out of Bangalore into the outlying areas, so that economic activity could spread outside the city. Bangalore and Mysore could become a single economic unit — much like Tokyo and Yokohama — if they are connected by a world-class expressway. Infosys has recently opened a massive training centre in Mysore. The remarkable human capital and increasing returns to scale of Bangalore — as a centre for IT — would be amplified if firms could spread over a larger area, access low costs while avoiding the shabby urban infrastructure of Bangalore itself. Karnataka is low on rainfall, has large stretches of arid land, and is strapped by high poverty levels. One of the ways it can grow, despite these constraints, is to develop as a modern centre for IT. But this cannot be done without infrastructure.

When the expressway project was initiated in 1995, it was envisaged as much more than just an expressway. It was, in fact, seen as an infrastructure corridor with five townships on the way to make it financially viable. A government order was passed to acquire land for the project, which was to be implemented by the Nandi Infrastructure Corridor Enterprise (NICE), a consortium of three private entrepreneurs. Today there are allegations that there was fraud in the land acquisition process and that excess land was acquired.

The Dharam Singh government approached the high court to stop further implementation. But the high court, in an enlightened judgment some weeks ago, ruled that the state should go ahead and implement the project. Yet, the government chose not to do so and instead approached the Supreme Court to appeal against the high court’s decision. This is a shame. Ironically, it is a Congress government now ending up undermining the decisions of the previous Congress government. At the Centre we see the UPA government appearing unwilling to implement the decisions of the NDA government. Here we have a Congress government — albeit in a coalitional arrangement with the Janata Dal (S) — opposing a project that was furthered by the Congress government headed by S.M. Krishna, which had preceded it. It is also not as if Krishna is out of the party. He has been made governor of Maharashtra. If the Congress cannot provide an efficient government to Karnataka, it is not just Karnataka, but India as a whole, that will suffer. Sonia Gandhi must take a special interest in the issue and sort it out before more local politics is allowed to destroy India’s future.