At The Indian Express we have a clear editorial policy on a few issues. Infrastructure is one of them. So, until the degree of the blunder became evident to us, we supported BRT as much as any of the other big infrastructure building initiatives in Delhi and elsewhere. Creation of infrastructure results in temporary inconvenience and citizens must learn to accept it. That is what we maintained when there was clamour against the Metro, the initial melee at the Delhi-Gurgaon highway toll plaza and now at the Delhi and Mumbai airports.

We had the same view on BRT, even accepting that the loss of tens of thousands of trees was unavoidable and worth the value we would get in return, in the form of the saving of fuel, time, money and CO2 emissions. So strong was our belief in this that I even planned my recording with tree-saver Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai along one of the BRT corridors and got her to say, more than once, that the cutting of some trees was okay, if it resulted in so many benefits. Then what is it, you may ask, that has so changed that view?

It was, to make a confession, my first look at the BRT “corridor” on that drive just last week. The obscene dividers that turn a beautiful, wide avenue into a series of parallel strips, segregating and forcing different kinds of traffic to drive bumper to bumper as if on a rail track, with no room for manoeuvre, overtaking, pulling off in case of a break-down. Contrary to what I had imagined — obviously stupidly — the BRT was not creating additional space or lanes for buses. It was taking two lanes away from an over-crowded road and why that exercise in brutal enforcement of licence-quota raj on our roads was going to cost Rs 1800 crore would be beyond most people’s comprehension.

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