Need for speed

Need for speed

Saritha Rai Posted: Nov 20, 2008 at 0047 hrs IST

: Bangalore’s international airport is six months old. The tally so far: number of weeks airport operational — 26; number killed on the road to the airport — 36, mainly villagers.

The story of the road to the new airport is the story of Nallamma. Each Sunday morning, Nallamma, 35, faces a quandary. As part of a ritual, the construction worker comes from a nearby village to the ‘new’ airport road to catch a bus to the weekly market a few kilometers away, to buy rations. She described her dilemma: to get to the bus-stop, should she dart across the busy road at the nearest point while trying to avoid the buses and cabs tearing past at dizzying speeds; or, should she walk to the busy Sadahalli Gate and clamber on to a bus slowing at the traffic light?

In a rush to launch a new airport, airport planners and city officials have arrogantly spared no thought to these villagers and their daily lives. Nallamma is the forgotten angle in Bangalore’s full-on hurtle towards globalisation. So are the villagers trying to cope with the six-lane road whose official speed limit isf 80 kmph.

On a recent Sunday morning, I watched as 32-year old Raju, a resident of Agrahara Layout, vaulted over the metal barricade. In a sequence worthy of an Apurva Lakhia movie, he then careened across the lanes avoiding the deadly buses, trucks and cars. He was in a rush to visit a relative, he said, and did not want to waste time walking over a kilometer to the nearest pedestrian crossing.

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Raju then let slip that his friend Venkatesh had recently perished under a speeding truck not far from that very spot. The older people, young children and women of his rural neighborhood are scared, he said. Villagers are getting killed “like flies” because vehicles have increased both in speed and numbers. The new airport and the road demonstrate that the rich are always in a tearing hurry, Raju lamented.

In a conversation, the officer in charge of regulating traffic on the road, Deputy Commissioner of Police Pandurang Rane freely admitted that crossing the road is a scary proposition. Once they take a hold of the steering, drivers behave like they are on a runway, not a highway, he described.

The road leading to Bangalore’s new airport is not one of those elevated roads or expressways built for airport traffic alone. On the contrary, till recently it was known as the Hyderabad highway, a national highway leading from Bangalore to Bellary in north Karnataka, to Hyderabad and beyond. Overnight the road connected the city to the airport, high-speed traffic spurted and so also the accident rate. Besides the fatalities, over a hundred people have been injured in accidents, mostly villagers, since the launch of the airport.

Now Rane and his deputies are scurrying around getting the medians closed and illuminating the stretch. The intermittently-placed barricades will keep out not just people but also animals, Rane hopes. He is proud that the traffic police managed to place eight traffic signals on the 30-kilometre stretch, despite stiff resistance from the National Highway Authority. Because of the new signals, drivers no longer fly, only speed, he said.

Still, villagers are at the mercy of the traffic. There are no pedestrian walkways. Stretches of the road are so poorly lit that night-time arrivals could wonder if they really landed in Bangalore. Traffic officers are now trying to educate local bus and truck drivers against speeding, and talking to pedestrians about crossing at designated spots. One of the officers involved in the training, sub inspector M. Sathyanarayana said that teaching traffic sense to the villagers was no easy task. People who have lived in the surrounding villages for generations and who ride bullock carts and bicycles have barely registered that there is an airport in the neighborhood, said Sathyanarayana. “They don’t realize that life around them has changed.”

And the education cannot happen overnight. “The villagers still need to go through primary before getting to high school,” Sathyanarayana observed. By any reckoning, the villagers are not the only ones in need of an education. Those who spent a decade readying an airport in Bangalore with no thought to how airport passengers would commute and, just as importantly, how people living on either side would get across, also need to be sent back to the classroom.