THE CEO Road show in Bangalore last week went on for nearly an hour. Seventy chief executive officers and another 150 senior executives in their two-piece suits wielded shovels and spades to spread sand and asphalt on a road that has been four years in the makingthe Hosur road that leads to the nerve centre of Indias Silicon Valley.
As the CEOs and top functionaries went about their protestmarching with placards, and observing two minutes silence for those who had lost their lives on the road apart from symbolically laying a stretchnot even the truck drivers whose vehicles were held up by the protest or the police inspectors controlling the traffic disagreed with the premise of the protest. It was not just the culmination of four years "daily suffering of over 50,000 people" employed in the industrial estate who spend three hours held up on the road commuting to work. It was also a catharsis for frustrated truck and bus drivers who ply the road that forms the corridor connecting Tamil Nadu and Kerala to the north.
"Every morning while others still sleep, we wait for long hours on Hosur road to reach work. And every evening while our dear ones wait, we are stuck on Hosur road waiting to reach home," laments Riaz Tareen, GM, Bifora Watches and president of the recently-formed Hosur Road Action Group (HRAG). Leading to the industrial town Hosur in Tamil Nadu, Hosur road is a national highway and the autobahn of the Electronics City and Bommasandra Industrial area which together account for nearly 600 companies on the road. Located in these two growth centres are blue chip companies like VXL Instruments, Bifora Watches, Infosys Technologies, Motorola, Novell Software, Hewlett-Packard, Tata Electronics, Birla 3M, FanucGE India, Moog, Kirloskar AAF, Coates of India and Lee Jeans.
The Karnataka government in 1992 decided to convert the two-lane road into a four-lane carriageway along with two service roads from the eighth kilometre to the 33rd kilometre. Funded by the Asian Development Bank, the construction contract worth Rs 47 crore was won by Larsen and Toubro in an open bid and the project was scheduled to be completed by April 1996. The construction, however, progressed at snails pace due to delay in demolishing buildings to expand the two-lane motorway; delay in shifting electric repeater stations, electric and telephone poles beside the two-lanes and a lack of co-ordination between agencies responsible for moving operations during the construction.
Six months behind schedule, four km of the 25 km stretch are yet to be completed and the unfinished stretch, dotted with potholes, is a veritable deathtrap. The result: lengthy traffic jams. "If there is a power shortage we can generate power. If there is a water shortage, we can buy it. But what can we do when there is no road?" asks Ashok H. Jagtiani, MD, Sealtite Dichtungs, and president, Bommasandra Industrial Association. Adds Vikram Shah, CEO, Novell Software: "The time spent to reach offices is creating a productivity problem. People whove left us say the time taken to commute was a deciding factor. Even our ability to hire the best in the industry is affected as people express their inability to spend hours on Hosur road."
Last year, the Bangalore traffic police had submitted a proposal to the state government to divert truck traffic passing through the city. The proposal is yet to be become a reality. CPWD executive engineer and project director for Hosur road, M.R. Bopparayappa, says the construction will be completed by December if the monsoons withdraw. Failing which the HRAG promises to adopt more novel methods of protest. All of which is a sad commentary as most HRAG members are better off managing the information highway than staging protests on Hosur road.
