India suffers from the highest number of deaths - around 1,05,000 in absolute terms annually-due to road accidents in the world owing to poor infrastructure and dangerous driving habits, the World Health Organization said on.In fact when Formula 1 recently made its debut in India, even hardened race car drivers were overwhelmed by the traffic chaos on the streets of the host nation.
Actually, In Delhi alone, 1,000 cars are added on the roads every day.
It is not very different in the other cities.Strangely, despite steep increases in petrol prices this year, there appears to be little let-up in congestion on Indian roads. The car boom that began several years ago continues merrily.
There are no less than 30 companies in the country manufacturing 120-odd models of cars, each in many variants.
Quietly encouraging this is the government, which benefits every time a plant for producing cars is set up. The result is worsening traffic chaos on the roads, even in towns and smaller cities.- While in a country like India with its huge population and millions of poor, the conveyance of choice should be mass public transport, preferably one that operates under the surface, the attention has been largely on privately-owned
vehicles, two-wheelers in their hundreds of thousands. - Incredible as it may sound, Kolkata which got the country’s first underground metro rail two decades ago has not gone in for any significant expansion. The single north-south corridor with which the system was inaugurated still remains the only line.
- It is only very recently that Bangalore got its rapid rail system, with Delhi having had one since a few years. Admittedly, the Delhi Metro is not just world class, but also pretty extensive with more routes being planned.
It takes little intelligence or imagination to understand that since most Indian cities have less than 20 per cent of the total area as road space (compared to the desired 33 per cent), the best way to move people is through a wide network of public transport that includes buses and trains, maybe even boats. Such modes of transportation could save a mind-boggling amount of road space.Obviously, the political will to decongest the roads is lacking. Otherwise, India would have by now had an excellent public transport in place. Why the rivers and canals in some of the cities could have been efficiently converted into waterways.
What is urgently needed are drastic steps to ease traffic. Otherwise, cities and towns could get even more hellish.
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