Well that calamity was averted, and just as well. But one look at Josip Broz Tito Road today and I remember the disasters on my dissection table. Here indeed is at work a team of surgeons about as skilled at fixing our city’s transportation system as I was at cutting up frogs, rabbits, pigeons, leeches and cockroaches in my biology lab. Except that the mess they have created affects living people, and millions of them. Except also that they have access to a very cash-rich Delhi government’s billions to try and fix it. They will now build several bypasses, insert streets (in the form of ship roads and foot over-bridges) and even build a whole flyover at a cost of more than three times that of the original project. And all of this because in this lab the surgeon is also the examiner, and the victim, in this case the Delhi resident, is exactly as helpless, and nearly as dead, as the helpless chloroform-drunk rabbit on my dissection table.

Governments make mistakes and fix them. Politicians are also usually brilliant at knowing when to cut their losses. That they have taken leave of that basic instinct on this disaster is because the BRT is being built by an incredibly powerful alliance of well-meaning civil servants, politicians, activists, and private “experts”. They are all well-meaning and sincere, but it is now evident they were not as wise as they — and we — had imagined them to be. Proper homework and planning weren’t done. The plans were neither put in the public domain nor debated. No public opinion was created, not even any basic communication put forward on what such a radical surgery on our roads would mean for the city that matters more than any other to every Indian. It is now obvious it was an operation planned in stealth and executed through surprise. Unfortunately, much like George Bush’s misadventure in Iraq, it has produced shock and awe not just for the people of Delhi, but its own supporters as well. And that last category, I must state in the interest of full disclosure, even includes this newspaper, and of course, its editor.

... contd.