The recent fiasco with the Bus Rapid Transit was similarly flawed. (Even though its failure — measured from the car owner’s perspective — overlooked the fact that numerous bus passengers got to work in relative comfort and efficiency). Successful in Bogota and Jakarta, the copy of a time-tested model could not go wrong unless the imitation was itself inaccurate. Without underpasses, speed control, or incentives for car owners to use the alternative, the Delhi attempt was half-hearted and incomplete. It took only the picture of a cow happily squatting in the only usable lane to give a clearer experience of the local conditions within which the foreign copy was set.

In the interest of Delhi’s citizens who commute long distances daily, the government needs a radical shift from foreign clones to a scheme that allows people to abandon private cars altogether: to develop a traffic master-plan that effectively integrates all forms of public transport into a cohesive map, and links all points in the city through the BRT, Metro, three-wheelers, cycle-rickshaws and pedestrian sidewalks. With a road system free of private cars, this is a distinct possibility.

Unfortunately, the farce will end in blame and recrimination. The engineer under-designed it, the contractor went over-budget, project management caused the delays, the politician was unavailable for the inauguration... And yet, the fault lies less with the government, than the Indian inability to stretch the bounds of civic and urban imagination into a sustainable Indian model, and indeed, the will to persevere with its execution. A time-tested replica from a remote corner of the globe is a much safer bet, than treading the dangerous waters of self-evaluation and experiment.

... contd.