Whitefield residents protested for better roads in Bengaluru

By MA Deviah

There’s a long list of things that can be done on Bengaluru’s roads. Among them, tree planting in the potholes, test track for Nasa’s lunar rovers, obstacle course for special forces commandos, sets for movies like The Martian and Interstellar. However, driving is definitely not one of them.

On 30 November, a group of citizens got to together to tell the government that they had enough. About 10,000 residents of Whitefield and its surrounding areas made a human chain that stretched for 10 kilometers across Whitefield and Marathahalli. Even though it was a working day and dark clouds threatened to rain, residents and office workers came out in huge numbers, dressed in black as a mark of protest. While children were not allowed to protest, they too wore black to school.

Deepa Ravi, a resident of Whitefield, with two school-going children is furious about the conditions of the roads. Last week, after a downpour, the roads outside her community were gridlocked. “It took three hours for my five-year-old to reach home,” she said. That’s unacceptable by any standard, especially when her son’s school is just 3 kilometers away. “I would have walked up and got him home, but there are no pavements here,” she says.

This problem doesn't merely affect Whitefield; it’s true for the entire city. The standing joke in Bengaluru is, if you ask pedestrians why they walk on the roads, they ask in turn, “Where are the pavements?” And if you ask two-wheeler riders, who frequently get on to the pavements to bypass gridlocked traffic, why they ride on the pavements, they ask, “But, where are the roads?” When it rains and the potholes get submerged under dirty, stinking water, motorists slow down to a crawl to negotiate the terrain with just hope and a prayer, “God, please get me home with my axle intact.”

Rahul Gandhi spoke about the escape velocity of Jupiter. How about an escape velocity for Bengaluru? At 6 km per hour during peak hour traffic, nobody in Bengaluru is escaping anywhere. That’s not a typo; 6 km is top speed during rush hour all over Bengaluru. Recently, a satirical website announced that the Bengaluru Metropolitan Transport Corporation would launch an overnight sleeper coach from Silk Board Junction to the Hebbal Flyover, a distance of about 40 kilometers. A lot of Bangloreans reading it may not have realized it was a joke.

It’s not funny, it never was. Bengaluru is in permanent shutdown mode, as far as its roads are concerned. For someone who has reported on Bengaluru for years, it’s amusing to see the Congress and the BJP, both taking credit for Bengaluru’s IT revolution. The fact is, neither was responsible. Bengaluru’s IT industry developed in spite of the government, not because of it. Successive governments were busy striking real estate deals, not paying attention to the fact that the city needed to develop infrastructure to support the huge influx of skilled IT workers that would arrive here. Over the years, this has led to a city that is imploding.

Our ministers frequently visit other countries on study tours. What do they learn? Most of the world’s old cities do not have wide roads. But they have roads that are well paved and maintained. Bengaluru’s problem is not that we need wider roads, but that we need better-surfaced roads. Road repair is so shoddy that it’s a matter of days, sometimes hours, before the potholes appear again.

Bengaluru could be the only city in the world where even flyovers have potholes. That would be hilarious, but a young woman was killed when her husband rode their two-wheeler into one. The accident became world-famous when the city police, with unusual alacrity, booked the grieving husband for negligent driving.

Veerendra Mishra, a Whitefield resident and one of the leaders of Monday’s protests says, “Bengaluru’s roads are no more. They are unproductive, they are non-existent.” Most companies are skeptical. Ajay Prabhu, CEO of Quest Global, told Bangalore Mirror last week, "Thanks to the traffic problem, Bengaluru no longer remains the best place for engineers to work." His company has now decided to expand in Thiruvananthapuram. Prabhu’s contention is that employees, sitting it out in crawl-paced traffic, do not spend time either at home or in the office. “Productivity is affected,” he said.

Deepa Ravi says tersely, “All my personal time I spend on the road.” Unable to take it any longer she started an online petition to appeal to the chief minister to do something about the roads. Her petition, started a few days ago, has already been signed by over 8000 people. Will the chief minister respond? That remains to be seen. Nothing the government has done till now gives citizens an assurance that the government is interested in fixing the problem.

Meanwhile, Veerendra Mishra is happy with the response to the Whitefield protest he helped organize. The team is putting together a memorandum to be presented to minister in charge of the city, KJ George. “If we don’t get any response, we will hit the road again,” he says. Good luck finding one, Bengaluru’s long-suffering citizens may say to him.