Of several urgent decisions required by the new Government in Goa, the Supreme Court ruling on outlets selling or serving liquor within half a kilometre of national and state highways could be high on the agenda. With a march-end deadline for an “action taken report”, the hitherto fire-fighting drill to identify such outlets across the State has reportedly run into bottlenecks. For one, the exact point from where 500 metres is to be measured remains unclear; for another, inter-departmental variations persist in publicising a clearly understood hierarchy of roads particularly with reference to state highways. This is adding to the growing worry that the currently perceived uncertain economy of the State, would get a further hit and that too through a dispersed trade as largely regulated through a seamlessly licensed operation. This is especially so as there is no evidence to suggest that such outlets are significantly contributing to the increasing rate of accidents along highways in the tiny state.
In this context, I recall the period in the 1980’s when the inter-settlement transportation of people and goods by road across India began rapidly overtaking and racing away from such saturating movements by rail. This precipitated the haphazard mushrooming of activities along highways despite state laws that regulated ribbon development. In the process, the rate of highway related accidents grew exponentially for which truckers were singled out as the prime culprits. Clearly this was due to their livelihoods being based on the speed of them delivering long haul goods. Thereby, the truck has been in effect their ‘first home’ from where occasional visits were made to their real family abodes. As part of their forced bohemian lifestyles, the highway country liquor outlet or even the `English wine shop’ (as popularly called in North India) has in reality served as their ‘pit stops’ for `shots/nips or cans on fast moving wheels’. The highway pubs and eateries — licensed or otherwise, catered to comparatively relaxed road users, with the more sophisticated outlets being patronised mainly by families who collectively were more conscious of highway traffic codes.
Actions by several State Governments against ‘pit stops’ along highways were effective for a while; however, for its sustained impact, a series of related actions were missing. This was at a time when the transportation profile of India was being rapidly upgraded in keeping with policies on liberalisation. Accordingly, budgets for the movement of goods and people by road, rail, air, and water, in that order were dramatically up scaled and the hierarchy of highways were integratedly restructured. Thus a network of National Expressways (NEs) of 8-lane direct linkages between mega urban regions combined with National Highways (NH’s) of 6-‐lane inter-state connectors, received priority funding as the centrally regulated anchor for the intra-state movement of goods and people in a hierarchy of 4‐lane State Highways (SHs),3‐lane Major Districts Roads and 2‐lane Minor District or Taluka roads as facilitators of settlement level roads. The interface of this network with similarly upgraded networks for movements by rail, air and sea (as and where applicable) has started changing the settlements profile of India as coalescing towards an urban-rural continuum.
The emerging system of enmeshed regional, settlement and local area levels of transport-cum-land use plans was effectively tested for coordinated programmed growth through the National Capital Region Planning Act, 1985. This specifically crafted instrument of Parliament was for terrain about eight times the size of Goa encompassing the National Capital Territory of Delhi and its contiguous fifteen or so urbanising Districts in Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Rajasthan. The emerging NCR Plan as approved to house around seventy million inhabitants by 2021, incorporated a series of sectoral documents of which the most crucial was the “Transportation sub-plan”. In fact, the mobility networks and interchanges emanating from this plan, as also from similar plans for the mega-regions of Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai and emerging mega‐regions of Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Ahmedabad among others, have severally established the basic footprints of activity hubs across the nation. There is therefore reason to believe that the Supreme Court recognised such plans when ruling on issues as and when referred to them, like the one on liquor vends along highways and on which the Advocate General of India has recently opined that it need not be applied to pubs and eateries.
Of several sustainable growth directives emerging from Spatial Development Plans for mega-urban and other settlements in India, the following could be of relevance to State Government decisions on the present time-bound issue.
a) ‘Highways’ comprise an interlinking system of NEs, NHs and SHs as engineered for the rapid haulage of goods and people over long distances. In tandem, municipal governments are required to provide for the interchange of highway and city traffic through designed nodes at their periphery.
b) In general, highways are designed for speed; they function best through clear regulatory and directional signages without the distraction of hoardings. Also points of ingress/ egress to them are to be few and far between.
c) What are the lessons from the above for the ‘tiny’ State of Goa with its two districts that add up to a little over half the average size of an administrative district of India?
Also, like the littoral States it caters to all four typologies of transporting goods and people i.e. road, rail, air and water. Due to the thin divide between urban and rural, the State is Goa, therefore, badly needs a Transportation sub‐plan as a major mapped component of the on‐going Spatial Plan exercises at regional, settlement and local area levels under the Goa Town & Country Planning ACT ’74. This instrument as in the other States is the only one that regulates the use of land with provisions for transparency through citizen participation.
(The author is Ex Chief Planner, Govt. of India)
