On December 1, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav is due to step inside a shiny new red-and-silver coach and ride from Transport Nagar to Charbagh. He will be the first passenger on Lucknow’s new metro, the first phase of which is nearing completion since its initiation just over two years ago in September 2014. For Mr Yadav, this is only one of several landmark development projects that he believes will stand as testaments to his tenure. That is not how much of the rest of the country sees the Samajwadi Party government in Uttar Pradesh, though. For those outside, the news from Uttar Pradesh is a long and tedious family soap opera: a hapless son, an overbearing father, interfering uncles and so on. And, certainly, the Samajwadi Party has played more than a small part in making this the most appealing narrative — after all, the five MPs they sent to the Lok Sabha in 2014 were all members of the party’s first family.
But far more impressive than the Lucknow Metro, which is, after all, still a work in progress, or the Gomti river redevelopment, is the Agra-Lucknow expressway, which has recently been opened. The highway has been completed a full year ahead of schedule, a truly startling and unusual event in India, where lengthy cost and time overruns are the norm. It is worth noting that this is not a one-off, disconnected project, but part of a larger plan that spans governments. The Agra-Lucknow expressway will link the Yamuna expressway, which connects Delhi and Agra and was built under the previous Bahujan Samaj Party dispensation. This means you can drive from Lucknow to Delhi in about five-and-a-half hours. There will eventually be another segment connecting eastern Uttar Pradesh to Lucknow, though it is fair to say that the national highway system in the eastern part of the state is already reasonably effective.
Land acquisition for the expressway began in 2014 and involved over 30,000 farmers. In many other places, this would have been an enormous task, fraught with political complications. Consider the hassles associated with similar land acquisition in Noida, which caused Rahul Gandhi to make much-publicised trips to local villages. But there were few such stories from the Agra-Lucknow expressway, a tribute to the political management deployed by the Uttar Pradesh government. Of course, it is worth noting that the expressway traverses the heart of Samajwadi Party country, through the family’s pocket boroughs of Etawah, Kannauj, Mainpuri and Firozabad.
The firm grip the party and family have over the region will have made land acquisition easier, yet it is important to see how political management of the Yadavs’ sort — much derided, generally — is extremely useful when turned to the service of infrastructure building and of development in general. Various policy tweaks that were used are also worthy of consideration and emulation elsewhere. Online registration of land was possible for sellers; they were paid four times the circle rate; and the compensation was directly transferred into their bank accounts to speed up the process. Acquisition of 3,500 acres was completed in six months, and the final product was good enough for jets to take off and land on certain sections, which underlines the scale of the achievement.
Hopefully, the Union highways ministry under Nitin Gadkari is looking carefully at all this. The ministry has not covered itself in glory by repeatedly promising targets that it cannot deliver. It appears that one of India’s most complex and under-governed states has shown how targets can be achieved in a manner that the much more vocal central ministry has signally failed to replicate.