The Mumbai Traffic Jam

I was trapped in the typical Mumbai traffic with a friend in the passenger seat. I try to do something from time to time. I tried and observed the gigantic mass of cars and auto rickshaws before my buffalo car. I noticed that time was sucking us. You feel like blurting out that had this road been private, we wouldn’t have been suffering so much in this jam. We don’t wait in the endless lines at the private grocery road or private car rental. So why are we putting up with state ownership and management of the roads? The roads should be privately built, owned and managed.



My imaginary friend in the passenger seat was shocked. He was also alarmed! He probably thought that I was really zany. Roads are damned too expensive to be built by private entrepreneurs. We would be bumping into toll booths every few metres. Some over ambitious shot would raise the prices and probably also restrict the access. We would always be dependent on the rich guy with the road title and our freedom to move around would either be curbed or would come to an end. Why depend on the private exploiter when our government exists to provide us this wonderful service for free?


Meanwhile we sit there helplessly, stuck and almost motionless. Too many cars were attempting to crawl around too few roads. We spend billions of hours per year, knotted up in these congested roads.



Then there is the road construction, which the Government agency decided to undertake whenever and wherever it so desires, reducing a four lane to a one lane road in the name of expanding it to a six lane road. The six lane road comes up in the next generation. From then on, we drive in those hazardous roads.


Then there are accidents which knot up the traffic for kilometers and hours. The entire system is oddly unprepared for anything to go wrong, although something does go wrong every day. The accidents and jams keep happening and everyone just sits there waiting for the government to send its police, its ambulance, its cranes and other equipments, so that traffic can continue.


Sometime back I got caught in a traffic jam and thereby missed my flight. I had to eat my Rs 5K Ticket. I also had to buy another one on a different airline and paid another Rs.5.5K. Normally in a private market, if some service is responsible for making you lose Rs10.5K, say a CD in some software package is blank, you would have some recourse. But who am I going to charge for my losses due to shoddy road management? The BMC? Forget it!


___“My imaginary friend in the passenger seat was shocked. He was also alarmed! He probably thought that I was really zany_____..... Why depend on the private exploiter when our government exists to provide us this wonderful service for free?”___________




There are other costs. We pay through our nose for petrol and diesel so that this is funded for road construction and maintenance. Thousands, (if not lakhs) of people breathe their last on government roads every year. We are constantly harassed by policeman who hand out ‘parchees’ for doing things that hurts no one, like driving fast, changing lanes without signals. Do these really endanger others? Sometimes perhaps, but that is not the reason that we get ‘parchees’. We get ‘parchees’ because they provide a constant revenue outlet for the state and central government.


Road failures define a massive portion of our life. They influence us on where we live or where we choose to work. They gobble away our household budgets. They introduce us to the horrible tragedies of our lives, when our friends and children are disfigured or pass away on the killing fields of public road