Abhich and Parsoon are lexicons for all of us in Hyderabad and is something we have lived with since our childhood. Like all things common to us Hyderabadis, we have the passion of waking up at the eleventh hour and scrambling to finish what we should have done when it was due. Same goes for our government, civic authorities and yes - you and me.
The case of connectivity to the new airport at Shamshabad has been the subject of intense debate in the media and reams have been written about it. When the foundation stone was laid for the airport, everyone in the authority knew the timelines. You cannot build an airport in the middle of nowhere.
The first option that the state government zeroed in was the Indian Air Force Station at Hakimpet on the northern fringes of Secunderabad. It would have been in many ways ideal for a modern international airport. The area around Hakimpet is free from any crazy constructions like we have at Mahendra Hills which lies in the funnel of the existing Begumpet airport. Hakimpet would also have been within easy reach of flyers looking for an easy replacement for Begumpet. But the mandarins of both the State and Union government could not convince the air force bosses in a land-for-land deal. So they went looking for another location with an east-west runway approach. And that was in a village Shamshabad along the dusty southern fringes of Hyderabad.
So a survey was done by officials of the state government and the union civil aviation ministry, and it was Shamshabad. The land which largely belonged to the Wakf Board was contiguous and largely free of any encroachments. It still took some time and a change of government before a contractor could be found for the new airport airport. And true to like any government contract, a number of terms and conditions were laid down by the developer of the airport to which the Union Civil Aviation Ministery agreed without battling and eyelid. But that is another story for another day.
More on government lethargy. All of three years from the time the foundation stone was laid till the airport was taking final shape, no one from the government woke up to the disaster in the making. Suddenly in their great wisdom the babus in the officialdom realized that people who had to reach the airport needed a road to reach there. No just the flyers, but also the support staff including pilots, cabin crew, ground handlers, and hundreds of thousands who were going to work there.
So, like all other government projects this too began with endless rounds of meetings which finally decided that the panacea for the connectivity problem lay in one, an outer ring road and second, in an 11 km expressway from Mehdipatnam to Aramgarh. “Just do it” said Chief Minister, Y S Rajasekhara Reddy. “Yes boss” said the minions. No one had the guts to tell the CM that it would take a couple of years at the most for these ambitious projects to see the light of the day. YSR must have assumed that he could zip along the expressway to the new airport to inaugurate it. Predictably nothing of that sort happened.
This reminds me of a comment made recently by an Indonesian miinister about why Indonesia is racing ahead of India, specially in Infrastructure.“We, Indonesians are buddhus (dull people). So we come up with simple solutions for complex problems and make things happen. In India, you have brilliant people who come up with complex solutions for simple problems. So it’s always work in progress in India.”
It’s a tragedy that almost 60 years after we gained independence we have hardly any major project to showcase. There are exceptions like the Konkan railway or the Delhi Metro, which can be attributed to one man who had a vision to make it happen, E Sreedharan. This country needs more Sreedharans to take the country out of this morass that we are in. Will that happen ? Only time will tell.
No comments:
Post a Comment