For an Alternate Highway

Editorial:
The State Government has been demanding an alternate highway for Sikkim for quite some time now. The demand ebbs and flows with the intensity of the monsoons and given the manner in which the clouds have been playing, the demand will jump right back on priority in the coming weeks. Delhi is yet to relent with any clear commitments even though the demand is valid and urgent and the Centre has several times made token gestures towards granting the demand. Apart from the fact that Sikkim is too small a player in national politics, the Centre’s indifference is also in line with its short-sightedness displayed in many other important infrastructural projects at the national level.
Since we are speaking of connectivity, a look at the plight of the aviation sector is a revelation in itself of Delhi’s inexcusably poor planning. With private players taking to the skies with a gusto, the planners are now actually devising ways to make take-offs more difficult. Licensing is kept ludicrously exorbitant and the only reason available seems to be the fact that the infrastructure is not up to speed. How the infrastructure is overworked for a bare 600 flights per day in the whole country when one airport in Singapore handles 3,200 in the same 2 hours is something that the planning pundits need to be asked. The Frankfurt airport, only slightly bigger than Delhi or Mumbai, handles 20 times more flights. The planners knew that when the skies were opened for private companies, they would put planes on the runways, but no one seems to have realized that the infrastructure needed to be upgraded; as a result, we now have traffic jams above busy airports. Take the road connectivity for example. The nation has the second largest road network in the world. It’s 3.32 million km of roads is ahead of even China. The quality, however, remains woefully poor, compromising the very connectivity that roads bring. India has only 2,000 km of expressway network against China’s 30,000 km. 35 per cent of our national highways are single lane! This is easily understood when one realizes that India spends only $2.5 billion on roads a year whereas China allocates $25 billion. They have their priorities figured out, the bosses in Delhi, by comparison, are still trying to figure out the tricks of coalition politics, leaving them little time to plan coherently.
It is this scenario that thwarts Sikkim’s hopes of getting itself an alternate highway which is promised often but still not scratched out. For India, 65% of its freight moves on roads and 85% of the passenger traffic. For Sikkim, these figures are 100%. Without the roads, Sikkim becomes an island caught in a typhoon. Sikkim has to plan ahead. Even when the airport comes through, it will not take the entire tourist traffic. Most visitors will still get driven in. The number of tourist arrivals is already crossing the resident population and the Chief Minister recently announced a target of 1 crore tourist arrivals for Sikkim. Already, the roads are not just burdened with people traffic but also supply load to provide for the people here. Just general supplies are [because there were one lakh more tourists coming here than its 6.1 lakh population] double of what the State would consume if it lived without tourists. The army, deployed in rather strong numbers for a peaceful Sikkim, also moves very heavy. Then there is the freight load for the many hydel and industrial projects underway in the State. When viewed against this reality of vehicular traffic, the collapse of Sikkim’s roads should surprise no one. The existing alignment is mostly of 1903 vintage, when it was carved out for mule trains. It was not very sturdy even a century back and its collapse under the ever-increasing load was bound to happen. The nature of traffic Sikkim receives makes its important to devise new options; the existing alignment should not be taxed with both passenger and freight traffic and load has to be divided. The only way this can happen is if Sikkim gets an alternate highway. There will be those who will suggest that widening will solve Sikkim’s problems. Even from a layman’s point of view, this is ill-advised, and is being proven every day with the new troublespots BRO gifts the highway with its ‘back-cutting’ works. The hills cannot adjust to more back-cutting and widening will only lead to more landslides.
An alternate highway is advisable because the load will get distributed, more areas will get connected, and at least one road will be open all year-round. In case of blockages, the repairs can be more permanent because the engineers will not have to race against time whenever the road slips. The State has already made enough noises about the need for an alternate highway but has met with little success. It has to start looking at other options to fund its infrastructural requirements if it wants to avoid a situation where the very roads that drive in development and opportunities become the bottlenecks that strangle it.