In the 1939 American movie classic, The Wizard of Oz, young Dorothy Gale receives an important piece of
advice: follow the yellow brick road. Transported by a tornado to a strange
land, the young Kansan then travels to the Emerald City,
where she seeks the assistance of a mysterious wizard named Oz. The sorcerer is
a mere charlatan, however, and Dorothy learns an important lesson – this time
from Glenda the Good Witch. The shoes that Dorothy has been wearing could have
taken her home all along.
Nearly 70 years after L. Frank Baum's novel was adapted to
the silver screen, India is busy
building the Golden Quadrilateral (GQ), a 3,633-mile expressway that will link
the country's major population centers of Delhi,
Mumbai, Chennai, and Kolkata. Announced in 1998, the GQ is, according to the
October 2008 edition of National
Geographic, now "exceeded in scale only by the national railway system
built by the British in the 1850s". As the bearer of hopes for a billion
people, the Golden Quadrilateral is more than just another Indian interstate,
however.
Part of a $30-billion National Highways Development Project,
the GQ could transform India much as the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System changed
the United States. When President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed multi-million
dollar highway-construction legislation in 1956, America was a much different place.
From the rise of suburbs to the decline of urban areas, from the growth of
trucking to the promise of the automobile, the U.S. interstate highway system has
shaped American landscapes and lives.
Today, Indian road-builders are completing the GQ's North-South
and East-West Corridors, building a network of local highways along the way. Designed
to reach every town with more than a thousand people, the Golden Quadrilateral is
as much about social engineering as civil engineering. A nation of booming
metropolises and impoverished villages, India is a study in contrasts. Although
slow-moving bicycles still clog its highways, the historian Ramachandra Guha says it best. "I see the GQ as a metaphor for modern India, speeding along at a hundred
miles an hour".
Yet the Golden Quadrilateral (GQ) is more than a metaphor. It
offers proof of India's
industry, skill, and sheer determination. Then there's the matter of vision. As
National Geographic reports, highway planners
dream of roadways where sensors detect breaks in the pavement and trigger the
dispatch of maintenance personnel. It's not difficult to dream when you're
staring at a sleek flat-screen at highway administration headquarters in Delhi. There, the GQ's
administrators describe the Golden Quadrilateral as an "elegant collection of
data points" or "state-of-the-art machine".
Or yellow brick road?
Resources:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032138/
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/10/india-highway/belt-text
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Re: India’s Yellow Brick Road?
