India's New Fast Lane to the Future

New Delhi,

India’s new 3,633-mile highway when completed will link India’s major cities including New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, and Kolkata. By the end of 2009, the story that India only had dirt tracks will be a thing of the past. India realized that they couldn’t sustain growth without good infrastructure and the road was an important part of that. It has been the largest and most ambitious public infrastructure project in the country’s history. India hopes the expressway will push the country’s economic engine into overdrive, while bringing its booming metropolises out to its impoverished villages, where more than half the population lives. They like to prefer to it as, “a technologically advanced conveyor belt moving goods and people around India with seamless precession.”

 

The new national highway has charged the hopes of a billion people, which has resulted in the automobile industry growing at a rapid rate. Currently, there are approximately 8 vehicles per thousand people and whichever way you look at it India is seriously under motorized and underdeveloped. However, there’s scope of even greater growth in the automobile industry with really cheap cars coming out that are as low as $3,000.

 

In addition, newly purchased vehicles such as cars, trucks, SUVs, motorcycle, and auto rickshaws, along with the occasional bicycle or bullock car are blessed by the temple priest, who delivers the Hindu equivalent of curbside service. This specialty ritual called a puja brings prosperity and good fortune, particularly to machines and those setting out on something new.

 

India’s fast lane to the future is very unique in that the six-lane superhighway coexists with sacred cows that have the right of way, sheep, goat, and many other animals as well as motorcycles, lines of trucks and cars coming straight at you because it’s shorter or easier. Also towns cut in half by the highway are especially dangerous, since crowds of pedestrians cross in the face of oncoming traffic, which rarely breaks speed voluntarily. It’s a good glimpse of the Indian character, which is enterprising, creative, pushy, energetic, relentless, and surprisingly good-natured. There’s nothing hostile about it; it’s just that standing still is not an option to the Indian culture.

 

India understands that this project isn’t to all Indians advantage, but in the end they believe more people will benefit from this project than be hurt by it. They say, “That’s the nature of progress.”

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