NHAI hai, hai ...

The highly vexatious experience of those who use the new expressway between Delhi and Gurgaon brings to the fore some important issues. First and foremost is the basic issue of assessing traffic correctly, for how else will supply match demand? On the Gurgaon expressway, the consultant who forecast traffic growth was Rites, which projected 130,000 vehicles per day on the road by 2013. That figure has already been reached, on opening day. While this may not be the fault of the National Highway Authority of India (NHAI), which has got the road built, it was certainly the NHAI's responsibility to assess whether traffic growth was faster than the projections made a decade ago, and to plan accordingly. There is also the simple business of assessing how many toll gates are required at a toll "plaza" to handle the traffic volume, and a short time-and-motion study would have provided the answers. This does not seem to have been done, and even 18 toll gates each way (more than on expressways in most parts of the world) have not been able to ensure smooth passage for those using the expressway.

That in turn is because of two things: the failure to issue enough pre-paid cards so that cars can whiz past without stopping (there was a needless security deposit that has now been dropped, and even now there is much pointless documentation to be produced), and the refusal to have round numbers for the toll. The amounts being charged are Rs 11, Rs 16 and other such odd numbers, and the tolls on the rest of the highway to Jaipur and that to Agra have similar odd numbers. This is presumably because the original round number has been indexed to inflation, but surely there can be a rounding off to the nearest five rupees. All this is of a piece with the failure to provide for enough crossings above and below the expressway, so that people can cross from one side of the road to the other. The result is that people feel obliged to make a desperate dash for it across four or more lanes of fast traffic to get to the other side, and the inevitable result is deaths in what cannot in all conscience be called "accidents". These many failures in a high-visibility project point to the fact that pouring money into a project is not enough, there has to be better planning and work organisation too.

Among the questions that the government needs to ask the NHAI is why it prefers more bridges with longer spans, when fewer and shorter bridges would do. The world over, the practice is to raise the lesser road while leaving the major artery to run flat. The NHAI has been doing the opposite, thus inflating the cost, sometimes by as much as five times, and this gets reflected in the toll or the user charge that is levied. The Planning Commission has been raising this issue with the ministry of surface transport and hopefully the matter will be resolved soon.

One final issue that India needs to resolve may sound arcane, but it is of importance. This is the difference between tolls and user charges. The difference is that while tolls should ordinarily be based on specific legislation for each bridge or road, and change only infrequently when the law is changed, user charges have no such requirement because they are normally used for demand management and play a role in the local transport strategy, especially where multi-modal networks are created. The tolls levied in India, because they are inflation-indexed, fall in-between and cause a lot of confusion. Therefore conceptual clarity also needs to be achieved.