Roads are not enough, we need smarter infrastructure thinking

A journalist’s question about the newly opened Ganga Expressway caused more outrage than reflection last week. After officials announced that the road connecting Meerut to Prayagraj would cut travel time by five hours, he asked simply: “What will people do when they arrive five hours earlier?” Critics piled on immediately, calling him anti-development and politically motivated.

That reaction is telling. In India, large infrastructure announcements have become almost sacred — to question them is to invite accusations of obstructing progress. But civic scrutiny of public spending is not obstruction. It is a democratic obligation. And when a government spends thousands of crores of public money on a single road, the public is entitled to ask hard questions about what they are getting in return.

The journalist’s question was clumsy, and his critics were not entirely wrong to push back. But the debate it triggered is worth having — carefully, honestly, and without political point-scoring on either side. Because the real question is not whether expressways are good or bad. It is whether we are building them well, for the right reasons, with the right safeguards. On that score, India’s record is genuinely mixed.

What the research actually says

Let us start with something the connectivity sceptics rarely acknowledge: there is substantial evidence that roads work. A large body of economic research from developing countries, including India, shows that improved road access correlates with reduced rural poverty, higher agricultural incomes, better school attendance, and greater access to healthcare. The World Bank’s studies on India’s rural roads programme (PMGSY) found measurable improvements in wages and consumption for villages that received paved road connections.

The Mumbai–Pune Expressway, for all its early controversies, is now widely credited with catalysing the growth of Pune as a technology and manufacturing hub. The Delhi–Jaipur corridor has made Rajasthan more accessible to investment and tourism. These are not trivial outcomes. Connectivity, done well, genuinely changes economic geography.

So “improved connectivity” is not a hollow justification. It is a legitimate development goal with a real evidence base. Anyone building a critique of expressway policy needs to engage with this evidence honestly, rather than dismissing it.

…and yet, something is missing

Acknowledging that roads can work is not the same as concluding that every road will work, or that every road is being built responsibly. India’s expressway program, impressive in its scale, has real and documented failures that deserve honest examination.

Financial viability has been a persistent problem. Several private developers have walked away from projects or gone bankrupt, not because the infrastructure was unwanted, but because of poor traffic projections, mispriced tolls, and land acquisition delays that the original models never accounted for. These are not just business failures — they strand half-built roads, strand displaced communities, and waste public money through guarantees and bailouts.

Environmental review has been inconsistently applied. The Char Dham road-widening project in Uttarakhand became a national controversy because planners pushed ahead with designs that geologists and ecologists warned were unsuitable for fragile Himalayan terrain. The Supreme Court had to intervene. That a project of such environmental sensitivity could proceed as far as it did reflect a planning culture where speed is rewarded and caution is treated as an obstacle.

Safety awareness is almost entirely absent. This is perhaps the most damaging and most easily correctable failure. When a new expressway opens, NHAI and its concessionaires invest enormous sums in construction and virtually nothing in educating the communities that suddenly find themselves living beside a high-speed corridor. The results are predictable and tragic: helmetless riders on expressway lanes, wrong-side driving to avoid distant U-turns, pedestrians crossing where no crossings exist. These are not failures of local people. They are failures of institutional responsibility.

The two-way street nobody talks about

The most genuinely original idea in the public debate around expressways — and one that receives almost no attention — is that connectivity is not a one-way gift from cities to villages. Roads move things in both directions.

Yes, expressways give rural communities access to larger markets, better hospitals, and educational institutions. But they also open those communities to the full force of urban commercial culture: processed food in non-biodegradable packaging, aggressive consumer marketing, and a torrent of digital content that has arrived in villages faster than the institutions — schools, libraries, community centers — needed to help people engage with it critically.

This does not mean rural communities need to be protected from the outside world — that would be paternalistic and wrong. People have the right to make their own choices about what to consume and how to live. But it does mean that policymakers should think seriously about whether new infrastructure is accompanied by investment in the social and institutional capacity that allows communities to benefit from connectivity rather than simply being swept along by it. A fast road to a city is most valuable when the village at the other end has functioning schools, healthcare, and economic opportunity to anchor its residents.

What the Instagram reels argument gets right and wrong

The journalist’s original question — what will people do with five extra hours? — was trying to make a real point, but it made it badly. The implication that saved travel time is worthless unless people use it productively is not only elitist; it is also historically shortsighted. People did not immediately know what to do with electricity, the telephone, or the internet either. The value of infrastructure often takes a generation to fully materialize.

But the underlying concern is not entirely without merit. If five hours of saved travel time accrues primarily to people who are already mobile, already connected, and already economically active — if it is, in practice, a subsidy to freight logistics and middle-class car owners rather than a transformation of life for the rural poor — then the distribution of benefits matters. Infrastructure that predominantly serves the already-advantaged, while displacing the poor and degrading local environments, is not neutral. It is a policy choice about whose lives we are prioritizing.

The right question is not “should we build expressways?” but “who benefits from this expressway, who bears its costs, and what are we doing to ensure the benefits are broadly shared?” These are harder questions. They take longer to answer. But they are the questions a serious development conversation demands.

A framework for better infrastructure decisions

Rather than either celebrating every expressway as a triumph of national ambition or dismissing them as vanity projects, we need a more rigorous public conversation. That conversation should center on five questions:

·         Who benefits, and how? Traffic modelling should be transparent and independently verified. The distribution of economic gains across income groups, regions, and communities should be projected and monitored.

·         Who bears the costs? Land acquisition, displacement, environmental degradation, and cultural disruption are real costs. They should be quantified, minimized, and fully compensated — not treated as acceptable collateral damage.

·         Is the financial model honest? Traffic projections for toll roads in India have historically been over-optimistic. Unrealistic forecasts lead to developer failures, public bailouts, and stranded assets. Independent scrutiny of financial models should be mandatory.

·         What complementary investments are planned? A road without safety awareness programmes, without access roads to villages, without integration with public transport, and without local economic development planning delivers a fraction of its potential value.

·         How will we measure success? Not ribbon-cuttings. Not traffic volumes. But changes in rural income, school attendance, healthcare access, and quality of life for the communities the road was meant to serve. These should be measured, published, and held up against the promises made at the inauguration.

Conclusion: scrutiny is not cynicism

India needs infrastructure. It needs better roads, faster connections, and bolder investment in its physical backbone. Nobody serious disputes that. But need alone does not make every project good, every design sound, or every cost acceptable.

The journalist who asked what people would do with five saved hours was reaching for something important, even if he reached clumsily. The critics who shouted him down were defending something real too. But neither side actually answered the question that matters: are we building this road in a way that will genuinely improve the lives of the people who live along it?

That question is not anti-development. It is the most pro-development question you can ask. Because infrastructure that fails the people it was meant to serve is not progress — it is just very expensive concrete.