Leader comment: Fastlane the expressway

Fastlane the expressway
Karnataka’s infrastructural growth requires enlightened verdicts like this one

Shekhar Gupta, Editor, The Indian Express

Maharashtra today is paying the price in terms of public anger for the lethargy its political leaders have demonstrated over planning for adequate power generation within the state. The political custodians of neighbouring Karnataka, too, have betrayed a similar shortsightedness, especially when it came to building infrastructure like the metro that Bangalore desperately needs, or the international airport which got the green flag only a couple of months ago after hanging fire for years on end. Indeed, if Karnataka had got its infrastructural planning right, it would have been looking the world in the face and its capital, Bangalore, could have emerged as the unchallenged hub of the world’s knowledge industry. If that prospect appears iffy at the moment, it is the state’s political leadership that is largely to blame.

Given this background, the Karnataka High Court’s judgment on Tuesday was especially useful. The state’s infrastructural growth requires precisely such enlightened verdicts. There are two aspects to this judgment that need to be flagged. One, the court is very clear in its mind that the four-lane Bangalore-Mysore highway — the agreement for which was signed exactly eight years ago — is in the state’s interest and must not be stalled at any cost. Two, the court’s unhappiness with the tactics of the state administration was expressly manifest in its move to prosecute Karnataka’s chief secretary and under secretary of the department of commerce and industry for seeking to mislead it. This was also an indictment of the politicians behind these bureaucrats, since it is they who chose to hobble the project by alleging — falsely, as the court discovered — that excess land had been acquired for the project.

The Karnataka government’s response to the verdict is of a piece with its generally retrogressive stance on such matters. When the court has ruled that work on the expressway should proceed apace, the state government now wishes to put a spanner in the works by filing an appeal against the judgment in the Supreme Court. This will only introduce more delays in a project that has already been dogged by uncertainty. The Congress leadership in New Delhi, and Congress President Sonia Gandhi specifically, should make the state’s Congress chief minister see sense. Karnataka requires greater connectivity and the need of the hour is to fastlane that expressway. The state’s future cannot be held to ransom by politicians whose vision does not extend beyond their own backyards.