Getting the solution wrong..

 

Bad roads and poor infrastructure has been one of the persistent issues for Bangalore and BBMP has always been bullied by the public, media and the rusted government chairs. A drizzle is all that is needed to expose the quality of patch work and new roads.

I read an article where BDA were planning to turn tables on the contractors and penalize them, in cases where the roads laid or patched up opens up within the stipulated period agreed in the contract. Authorities believe this would make contractors accountable and contractors would hopefully pee in their pants and lay better roads as against paying penalty. This would partially help the rouge contractors do their job.

This is one of the good examples where a perfectly wrong and obviously solution designed for a problem that has several attributes.

I interviewed two such contractors from Chennai and Bangalore. Though the authorities and their work style vary between the two metros, one thread seems to be common. This is their story:

Once the government plans to lay the roads or patch them, a tendering process is initiated and lowest bidder gets the contract. When the contract is awarded in principle, the bidder needs to pay a commission to officials, authorities and all those involved in the bidding exercise including the helper who carries across the files. Failure or resistance to pay such debts would make the bidder’s life hell during the course of work.

Also to be noted is a transparent bidding is such a wonder that one would say Blue Moon is hardly one. The rust and lack of accountability makes even a higher bidder to get the contract through influence. Other contractors, who initially start out in a professional way are eventually forced to take such path because survival is at risk. This eventually leads to a subtle competition as whose influence is higher. Such influence points vary from heads of civic bodies, Members of Legislative Assembly, State ministers, Members of Parliament and of course one of the more influential factors is the political party in power.

Once the contracting process is over, a similar bribe package has to be distributed. This continues in multiple iterations, across the various phases of the project, till such time the actual work starts. And from where does the contractor pay the money? From the funds that are allocated for road laying. So with funds that are allocated for laying a 10-inch thick road and the funds distributed to keep chairs happy, all that is left help only in laying a 5-inch road.

And even if contractor is compelled to lay a 10-inch road, to avoid getting attention from any of the honest officials, contractor does that using materials of poor quality.

This precisely explains why even with such amounts of funds allocated from Centre to State to Districts to Authorities to Contractor, why we end up with such poor roads.

The design of accountability only shifts the blame on a player who can do very little from sustenance point of view. Guess it’s time to wake up and realize accountability has to be at the governmental level, which will eventually ensure that contractors do their work properly.