Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
targets that looked unreasonable and impossible,' he said. 'Gradually people realized what
could be achieved.' Highway contracts awarded while the BJP was in power, mostly on the
Quadrilateral, led to some 6,000 km being completed by the end of 2005. (Khanduri later
became chief minister of the state of Uttarakhand where he found it more difficult to be
effective in state-level politics.)
When the BJP unexpectedly lost the 2004 general election, the road-building programme
lost top-level sponsorship and direction, and it has never fully recovered. Sonia Gandhi and
her ministers did not seem to want to draw attention to one of their predecessor's spectacu-
lar successes, especially after the BJP had personalized it before the election with pictures
of Vajpayee on banners strung across completed highways. Manmohan Singh was an en-
thusiast and ordered widespread six-laning of four-lane highways, but T.R. Baalu, his min-
ister of road transport, shipping and highways, was more interested in promoting a shipping
canal between his home state of Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka than in building highways else-
where.
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There was also extensive infighting between the highways authority and ministry and the
Planning Commission, which wanted the private sector to replace the BJP government's
substantial public funding and unwisely insisted on complex contractual arrangements that
slowed down project awards. As frequently happened in the Manmohan Singh government,
no one took ministerial responsibility for making decisions that would cut through the leth-
argy, contract and funding rows, and corrupt aspirations. There were also inevitable delays
because of slow land acquisition and extortion by gangsters and Naxalite rebels. By the
end of April 2009, the total completed road had only gone up to just over 11,000 km, and
awards of new contracts had slowed to such an extent that work was only started on 9,700
minded momentum of the Vajpayee-Khanduri period was not recovered, though there was
a successful government-funded rural roads programme that opened up access to villages
and led to improved health and education services as well as access to markets for farm
produce.
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Sreedharan's Delhi Metro
Around this time, Delhi's highly successful metro railway was being built by Elattuvalapil
Sreedharan, a former Indian Railways engineer. He was 65 in 1997 when he became man-
aging director of the government-owned Delhi Metro Corporation and he stayed in charge
till 2012 when he turned 79. He was backed by Sheila Dikshit, Delhi's chief minister, and
by other city authorities including Vijay Kapoor, who was the lieutenant-governor when the
project began. They saw the urgent need for the railway, which was substantially funded by
