Category: government

Palace road widening, GIM investments and the impacts

The road widening hooligans are at it yet again. This time they are aiming to chop off full grown trees alongside the palace road from both cauvery theatre side as well as from TV tower side. Reason is they want to make it a 10-lane road leading to the already glorious (for the wrong reasons) airport. Of course Mr.Srikantadatta being from the royal lineage wants 40 crores per acre or per squarefeet – all this while the government is already mulling whether palace really belongs to him or not in the first place. The palace itself is earning crores of money for all kinds of events and some sundry income from few roadside meters chopped off is a feather in wadiyar’s money cap. Here it seems both the government and wadiyar are equally selfish to their own ends. Whether its road widening or underpass or flyover, in the name of infrastructure the government seems to be siphoning off funds here and there in mass scale. No wonder in the recent GIM, the government has sanctioned power projects alone to the tune of some 2 lac crore if i am not mistaken, and pat came the query from the high court asking for the details of such blanket approvals and what exactly were these projects. While industrialization of karnataka is not bad, mass approval of projects without any consulting agency or committee just by the chief minister is a certain invitation for trouble in the short future.

 

 

 

It happens only in India

I had written about bad driving and stressed out lifestyles in my previous blog post. This post is somewhat related to it closely. If you are driving on a road and you see a lorry stopped in the middle of the road with a twig of leaves sticking out of it like as if it were a flowering plant, then what do you make out of it? Should you assme the lorry owner is relaxing on the road? Well, welcome to India.

In India such a symbol means the truck has taken a hit either with another, or has a flat tyre, or perhaps even a flat axle or engine. It also means that this truck which you see has no immediate plans of being towed away from the accident spot and it also does not say anything about how many people it killed in that accident.

Take a break and come back tomorrow, perhaps it wont be there on the street. And the driver of the truck, well he has already been recruited by another truck company to drive and crash a different truck tomorrow. This is the biggest pity in India and Benglurur particularly.

If its a small vehicle its a HIT & RUN case, if its a large one, its a HIT & DRIVER RUNS case. The occupants of such trucks walk away stealthily into the crowds even before someone understands who did what at the scene of crime. And the police have no records of who is driving the truck, the truck companies have no records of who they recruit and there are also no records of the lost lives in these accidents. Everything is conveniently put into a file which says HIT & RUN case – now closed.

So much so that the entire truck drivers association (or union or whatever nonsense you may want to call it) are against the government for asking them to install speed governors in their vehicles. Their grouse is that the vehicle consumes too much fuel if driven at lesser speeds purposely. And if driven at higher speeds, others bear the brunt of their driving and land up at hospital or even worse – HELL.

So the government and the unions are not only putting at risk many a life in the city, but also sometimes their own kith and kin by doing such immoral decisions at their own cost.

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