New landscape in Old India: Building spree in the midst of familiar hassles

Even as the govt tries to scale up infrastructure, Centre-state squabbles, environmentalists' concerns, hassles over land acquisition and plain old project delays affect projects, writes T N Ninan

India is on a building spree: Highways, expressways, high-speed freight corridors, bridges over the sea, coastal freeways, metro lines in every large city, bullet trains, “semi-high speed” inter-city journeys from re-imagined railway stations, new deep-sea ports, airports … it is a long and impressive list. If things had gone according to plan and schedule, the map of India would have been transformed by the time the 75th anniversary of Independence rolled around. Now it will take a while longer.
 
Still, after three false starts, the trans-harbour link connecting Mumbai to its twin city on the mainland is finally getting