NVS Reddy, managing director of the Hyderabad Metro Rail Corporation (HMRC), prefers to be known as a poet rather than an engineer.As if to prove it is no haughty claim, he recites a line: “My structures are damsels dancing in the moonlight.”Reddy the poet hasn’t abandoned his professional interest and his “damsels” may now be “dancing in the moonlight”, but it hasn’t been easy. Not long ago, the upcoming metro rail project faced uncertainty owing to a number of religious structures. Hyderabad is a hugely polarised city, home to a large number of Hindus and Muslims. Reddy had the unenviable task of overseeing the shifting of temples and mosques. No surprise that he is not the most popular official in Hyderabad.Reddy actually moves around the city to inspect his “damsels” accompanied by a security detail these days. State intelligence reports claimed he could be a possible target for attack in sensitive pockets.“It has not been an easy affair. There were agitations in front of our office. My effigy was burnt several times,” says Reddy.Nevertheless, the metro rail project seems to have put behind it many of the religious obstacles.The HMRC team successfully negotiated with the managements of 16 out of the 21 religious structures that came in the way of the 72-km-long alignment of the rail line, according to Reddy.How so? HMRC handed out grants — Reddy calls them “very liberal” — as incentives to rebiglocate the religious structures. What happens if the doles fail? “If a priest or an imam refuses to move, we island [buy adjoining land to isolate to the structure] the structure,” says Reddy. The metro is being rolled out as a public private partnership (PPP) project, with L&T as the private partner.In India, the land of diverse beliefs and religions, Hyderabad is hardly the only city where infrastructure meets religion, often with undesirable consequences. Every nook and corner in both urban and rural lands would inevitably have a structure belonging to one religion or the other. A tree or even an incomplete concrete structure becomes “sacred” and consequently, immovable.The widening of highways, expansion of airports and rolling out of metro rail networks during the last one and half decades are all worth millions of dollars.But they are often up against multiple faiths, inescapably unshakeable, of a large swathe of people. Given that religion evokes unbridled passion in India, removing religious structures is a challenge.Authorities cannot take recourse to law to remove these types of infrastructure bottlenecks. Because there isn’t one — except the land acquisition act. That means agencies, be it government or private, have to rely on their negotiation skills with the managements of religious institutions. It is never easy. Money doesn’t always work. Moving court would only result in delays. Not even a legal threat would unnerve the people who manage these institutions thanks to the rich coffers.“It’s not religious temples or mosques that hold up infrastructure. It’s ‘Temples of Justice’ — India’s dilatory legal system — that act as a major bottleneck at all stages of infrastructure creation,” says Shailesh Pathak executive director of Bhartiya Group that has interests in building townships, among others.Indeed, infrastructure cases are stuck in courts for decades. India is ranked 142 out of 189 countries in the World Bank ’s Ease of Doing Business index. Due to this grim scene, infrastructure companies prefer “managing” religious trusts to moving court. “The only recourse is to fall back on out-of-court unofficial settlements. The encroacher is often persuaded to shift the structure by parting with a hefty sum,” adds Pathak who was a civil servant for 16 years before shifting to the private sector.Government agencies — National Highways Authority of India (NHAI), metro rail corporations and city development authorities — too prefer the same method. Only that it is an unwritten rule.Last week in Jaipur, the famous Rojgareshwar Mahadev and Khasthharan Mahadev temples were demolished to pave the way for the construction of a metro rail. Officials of the Jaipur Metro Rail Corporation executing the 12-km-long project first convinced the management of the two-centuries-old temples before relocating those.Yet, there was trouble in the air. About 400 cops were deployed in the area and about a dozen persons were taken into preventive custody. “We convinced the temple management that the relocation is out of sheer necessity,” says Nihal Chand Goel, chairman and managing director of Jaipur Metro.In Jaipur, six out of 13 temples have been relocated to roll out the metro.But what happens if the management of a religious structure refuses to budge? The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC), which has rolled out 190 km of metro line, still has unresolved issues concerning a 365-sq metre mosque and a large temple named Shyam Giri near the Shastri Park station. The matter datesback to September 1998, when DMRC purchased 155 acres from Delhi Development Authority (DDA), which failed to mention the existence of the two religious structures.“Our temple has remained in this place for over 700 years. Who is DDA to sell our land to Delhi Metro?I did the bhumi puja for the Shastri Park station.But later, Delhi metro used bulldozers and took away parts of our land,” says Raman Giri Maharaj, head priest of Shyam Giri Temple. “I was offered a huge compensation for relocating the temple. But I refused to accept it.”Maharaj may cry foul over lost land, but DMRC records handed to an RTI applicant on September 26, 2013 show that the temple still encroaches 11,500 sq metres, or roughly 1.5%, of the Delhi Metro’s 7,45,245 sq metre land.As for the Sabri mosque, the DMRC was forced to seek the intervention of the Delhi High Court as “local police and civic authorities failed to help the DMRC in the removal of the mazar”, according to a letter dated December 23, 2011, written by the then DMRC chief E Sreedharan to Lieutenant Governor of Delhi, a copy of which ET Magazine reviewed.“The said encroachment is hampering the proper circulation in front of Shastri Park metro station… It is feared that in the name of carrying out repairs, they is trying to extend the structures and encroach upon more and more area,” wrote Sreedharan.DMRC spokesman Anuj Dayal says there are no consolidated statistics on removal of religious structures for Delhi Metro. “We have solved 80 to 90 per cent of such cases through negotiation” he says.However, thanks to the government’s renewed infrastructure push — highways will have to be expanded to four and six lanes and airports will require more runways — the problem of relocating religious structures will only escalate.Some projects will have to grin and bear it, as it happened during the facelift given to the Kolkata airport. The problem there was a 25-feet-tall mosque located on the path of aircraft landing just 200 metres away from the second runway’s northern end.The regulator Airport Authority of India failed to convince the management of the mosque. The government was forced to fork out money to lengthen the opposite side of the runway. RP Singh, who retired as NHAI chairman last month, says relocating religious structures would be easy if local politicians distance themselves from the affair. “They [politicians] often make a hue and cry to extract political mileage,” he says. Political will is another matter.Ahmedabad’s bus rapid transport system (BRTS) ran into both temples and mosques during construction.M Ramachandran, who was Union urban development secretary when BRTS was built in the Gujarat city, says: “The advantage in Gujarat was that it was under a single command. The municipal commissioner just needed to flag such an issue. The rest was managed by the CM.” He was alluding to Narendra Modi who was the chief minister of Gujarat then.As prime minister, it remains to be seen if Modi can replicate the same success in rolling out massive infrastructure projects across India. As the above examples show, negotiations and payouts have their limitations.