Overhauling the country’s roads and railways will make it richer and much better-connected
filled the carriage as the Vande Bharat Express raced through the flatlands of Uttar Pradesh, bound from Varanasi to Delhi, at 130kmh. That is a shade faster than the Northeast Regional ferries passengers between New York and Washington—and by Indian locomotive standards revolutionary. The train covers its 759km route 130 minutes faster than the next quickest service. “It’s so much more comfortable!” says M. Afzal, 42, a cloth dealer from Varanasi heading to Kanpur, an intermediate stop.
Two new “freight corridors”, between Mumbai and Delhi and between Punjab and West Bengal, are semi-operational and scheduled to be finished by next year. Another four are on the cards. Their electrified tracks will allow goods to be moved on 1km-long trains at speeds of up to 70kmh; up from 25kmh today.
The makeover has clearly accelerated on his watch. The 50,000kms of national highway India has built in the past eight years is twice as much as it managed in the previous eight. The number of airports with civilian flights has soared, from 74 in 2014 to 148 this year. Domestic passenger numbers have duly risen from 60m in 2013 to a peak of 141m in 2019, before the pandemic hit.
Though the new infrastructure is mostly too new for its effects to have been studied, they are likely to be positive. A seminal paper by Dave Donaldson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology evaluated the economic impact of the 67,247km railway-network built on the subcontinent by the British between 1853 and 1930. It found that it “reduced the cost of trading, reduced Inter-Regional price gaps, and increased trade volumes”.
Yet roadblocks remain. The biggest is land acquisition, which acts as a brake on building anything in India. Its billion-plus citizens have rights and its courts move slowly. Enforcing contracts is hard in a country where higher courts have 6m pending cases and lower ones face a backlog of 42.6m cases. Outdated land records and squabbles over title make their task harder. Obtaining environmental clearances is another headache.
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