NEWSFLASH -Porvorim, Goa 4th September 2007
Oh! What a landslide there was! For more than a week , one half of the road was cordoned off to traffic, while a whole slew of administrators got into the act, rubbing their greasy paws in anticipatory glee. As Confucius say, “Calamity unearth whole bag of riches for unscrupulous businessman and bureaucrat”
It got to the point where many legislators arrived at the Secretariat, used the bathroom, then immediately began returning home.
Opposition leader Manohar Parrikar, in his haste, and under tremendous pressure, both political and from his vesica urinaria, forcibly removed the barricades, so he could get there faster.
Imagine this; if you were trying to get from Panjim to the Mapusa Friday Market in a real hurry, travelling at roughly the same speed as the River Princess, creeping past long stretches of barricades and immobile construction equipment, you notice a heart-warming sign which says, “Men at Work, Inconveyance regretted. Please bare with us.” Now doesn’t this make you especially grateful for the efficiency of the unsung employees of the Department of Road Signs!
But what can we as citizens do to relieve traffic congestion in times like these? Quite a lot actually. We can car pool so that instead of just being stuck in traffic while dropping your screaming kids to school, you can be stuck in traffic while dropping all your neighbours screaming kids to school as well. Or, while commuting to work, instead of your car, take the bus along with your junior colleagues and be stuck in traffic smelling their bodily odours.
In a later study by a Commission of Inquiry (completed over 6 months at a total cost of Rs. 300 crores) the root cause of traffic congestion at the bridges was, “not the landslide but too many people driving.” Of course the other problem as always is: highway “maintenance”.
Immediately after the landslide, The Division of Road Blocks set out hundreds of steel barricades manned by fierce looking policemen, (these are essential to the commencement of any and all highway projects.) This effort used up the entire budget for the current financial year, and left the highways department with no financially responsible choice but to abandon it till the commencement of the new fiscal year, after receipt and “adjustments” had been made to and from the Prime Ministers’ Disaster relief fund.
With the little money left over the administration moved on to:
Stage Two: Road deconstruction.
This is the next essential part of a highway project where: Large bulldozers, excavators with caterpillar tracks, and angry men with jackhammers and drilling equipment that would make my dentist cringe with envy, arrived and proceeded to reduce the hill to a pile of rubble. In the process every square centimetre of the usable road has been scored into something resembling the lunar landscape.
Stage Three: Nothing happened in stage three which typically lasted for 8 months.
Stage Four: In May someone discovers that the pile of rubble is unstable and the Department of Stability (motto: We can always blame it on the rains) begins to dig huge ditches at the base of the pile. With the rains due in June they hope the unstable rubble will flow down into these ditches and not onto the roofs of passing vehicular traffic. So by the time the rains recede the filled ditches can be used as foundation to put up a retaining wall......or not.
We must realise that good citizens need to pay a price for progress. As the saying goes, ''Rome was not built in a day. Ergo: You cannot make an omelette or the NH17 a motorable highway without putting thousands of road users through living hell for at least a decade.''
When Highway Project NH17 is finally done, Goa and the world will be a better place.
Unfortunately, that will be another twenty thousand years from now, and the only living things left on Earth will be cockroaches. As they frolic along the wide-open, obstacle-free NH17, they'll wave their tentacles at each other, and say: ``I'm so glad they finished this road before they became extinct!''
