Raju then let slip that his friend Venkatesh had recently perished under a speeding truck not far from that very spot.  The older people, young children and women of his rural neighborhood are scared, he said.  Villagers are getting killed “like flies” because vehicles have increased both in speed and numbers.  The new airport and the road demonstrate that the rich are always in a tearing hurry, Raju lamented.

In a conversation, the officer in charge of regulating traffic on the road, Deputy Commissioner of Police Pandurang Rane freely admitted that crossing the road is a scary proposition.  Once they take a hold of the steering, drivers behave like they are on a runway, not a highway, he described. 

The road leading to Bangalore’s new airport is not one of those elevated roads or expressways built for airport traffic alone.  On the contrary, till recently it was known as the Hyderabad highway, a national highway leading from Bangalore to Bellary in north Karnataka, to Hyderabad and beyond. Overnight the road connected the city to the airport, high-speed traffic spurted and so also the accident rate.  Besides the fatalities, over a hundred people have been injured in accidents, mostly villagers, since the launch of the airport.

Now Rane and his deputies are scurrying around getting the medians closed and illuminating the stretch.  The intermittently-placed barricades will keep out not just people but also animals, Rane hopes.  He is proud that the traffic police managed to place eight traffic signals on the 30-kilometre stretch, despite stiff resistance from the National Highway Authority.  Because of the new signals, drivers no longer fly, only speed, he said.

... contd.