Requiem for a garden city

Subir Roy: Requiem for a garden city
Business Standard

Bangalore is ready to get what it has been longing for — the metro rail project. In anticipation, even an attractive logo has been released. Between the Centre, state government, the Japanese and our banks, money should not be a problem. The few sceptics who remain can be expected to be bought over by the marketing savvy that the logo signals is coming.

The foundation for solving the city’s traffic problem has been laid. Come, say, 2011, which is just five years away, the city will steal a march on upstart Hyderabad that has dared to come up from behind and forge ahead. Its traffic, which used to move slower than Bangalore’s, is now faster. George Bush found this out and planned his trip accordingly. President Hillary Clinton, despite her party’s opposition to outsourcing, will do better — pay a visit to Bangalore that will be back on the fast lane.

A few things will, of course, go wrong in between but solutions will be found. The metro will suffer huge cost over-runs, the state government will throw up its arms in despair, the Central government will have no option but to bail it out and once the rolling stock rolls, tickets will be priced exorbitantly in order to recover running costs.

But there will be enough money in Bangalore to have a good few people use this upper-class mode of transportation. The system will remain grossly under-utilised for a decade or more but, thereafter, things will be quite busy. The poor people, your maid and my driver, will continue to use the bus system, the way they do in Mumbai, where the flyovers are for the private cars and the buses use the old roads that go alongside them.

As for the metro rail not solving all the city’s traffic problems, corrective steps are already on the way. Even as the metro rail construction causes dislocation, dust and traffic jams take their toll for the next half decade, the state government will be busy putting in place its second tier solution. Five or six elevated expressways will be built, linking north and south, east and west.

These will go down the main thoroughfares and one of them will begin or end — whichever way you like to put it — near the Raj Bhavan, whose diminutive colonial structure will look smaller still. I can barely wait to see the fun we will have on the roads with so much construction on. Any number of tourists will come from around the world to see this urban disaster in full play, the way they used to come to see the Dying Calcutta. Not one but two airports, a new one and a revamped one, will cater to them.

But these tourists will be the suckers, giving us their dollars even as we thumb our noses at them and take recourse to the third layer of solution — the new towns along the new expressway that will disperse whatever excess pressure there will still be on the city’s roads. There will only remain this small matter of finding land for the new expressway and the new towns. But displacing a few thousand farmers is small beer for a country that has bravely displaced tribals many times the number to execute the great big hope that is the Narmada project.

It is standard dramatic ploy to have between scenes the common man or the voice of reason playing spoilsport and repeating the unpalatable that seeks to puncture the hubris of the main players. In this drama of the absurd to destroy Bangalore as we have known it, there will be this actor in rags who will keep repeating between scenes: Try having more buses/ Run them on LPG/ Tax the car owners/ And we will love thee!