Even the works undertaken with the best of intentions can have unintended consequences. The social welfare programs launched in India over the past decade have been a dismal failure, according to the World Bank. The biggest hurdle to effective aid delivery in India, it noted, was rampant corruption. According to another WB report made public earlier this year, South Asia as a whole, despite embarking on noble initiatives like creation of South Asian Food Bank in 2008, has failed to work out an effective regional mechanism to tackle food shortages, even while it is becoming clear that it is impossible for any one country in the region to be food-sufficient on its own. As the latest example of a well-intended project gone wrong we might take the government’s road expansion drive.
Undoubtedly, the Valley needs wider and better roads: the number of vehicles plying its streets having gone up 15-fold in the last 20 years. Nonetheless, the government’s road expansion program has come under a lot of criticism. Some see it as yet another example of a Maoist-led government’s dislike of private property. Others have criticized the drive for its sheer brutality: notice, they point out, how common men and women who have been residing in the same place for decades are now being forced off their properties by baton-wielding police. Less disputable is the fact that the drive has contributed to disfiguring the valley. (One letter to Republica explained how a German friend of the writer, on witnessing the widespread roadside destruction in Kathmandu, compared the Valley to the bombed-out German city of Dresden during the Second World War.)
Aesthetics aside, there are other serious issues: the health concerns of those living by the roads perhaps the biggest. A housewife in Ratopul has contracted a notorious cough for the last few months as the dust from the razed roads sweep into her room every time a vehicle passes her house. A little boy in Kamalpokhari is beset by eye-irritation, which makes reading and watching TV a painful ordeal. And lest we forget, the enormous craters by the roads can be fertile breeding grounds for water-borne diseases during the upcoming rainy season. For going by the current rate of work, it might be months before all the demolition work in the Valley is completed. Only then will the road pavement works commence.
Again, no matter what its ultimate goals, there is no denying that the demolition drive has been a badly planned project that has failed to take into account its repercussions on the health and convenience of common people. But there is also no point crying over spilled milk. We rather urge the government to work in earnest to clean up the mess out on the streets at the earliest. Already mired in a difficult transition, a widespread epidemic of a potentially fatal disease is the last thing the country needs at this hour.
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