Where have all good roads gone
There’s a few acres in Nagaland that my uncle bought back in the ’90s. Today he uses it to run a mission school and after my grandmother rented out her house in Imphal, this place has sort of become the default get-together point for relatives from my mother’s side.
It’s a really nice place. Nestled within a small patch of woods and surrounded by a beautiful expanse of paddy fields, it’s like an escape from the real world. Time goes slower over there but it never drags. You could live like a farmer and forget all about the headaches of urban life like traffic, bad Premier League fixtures and politics of any form. I should know, I spent most of my gap year volunteering as a math teacher over there.
I don’t ever mind visiting the place. But what I do mind is the road we have to take to get there.
You see, this property is by a remote village called Gaili, in the district of Peren and it’s about 15 kilometers off the Dimapur-Kohima highway.
Now that might not sound like much, but let me tell you that up until 2017, it took close to 90 minutes to cover those 15 kilometers. If you need a reference, it takes less than half that time to drive from Dehradun in Uttarakhand to the hill town of Mussoorie. That’s 35 kilometers and uphill. Why are we so much slower in Nagaland? Because the road to Gaili is nothing short of a fully dry riverbed and getting there is an experience much like riding a horse — minus the joys of riding an actual horse.
Today, it would take me about a 50 minutes to drive to Gaili instead of the usual 90. There’s two reasons why. First, because after living there six months back in 2016, I’ve become used to the road a bit and know what line to take to drive the fastest. And second, because a road construction project was issued for the area a couple of years ago and the contractors got as far as laying the aggregate base (you know, filling it with gravel and stuff). Unfortunately, it was just before they began to actually pave the road when they realized no one was paying them for the job. And the work has been abandoned ever since.
I will say this — the gravel has somewhat smoothened out the road, making it a bit more traversable, for the most part; although it’s also made the whole trip a lot more dusty. Something that gets worse after every monsoon.
So here we are today, 2021, and nothing’s changed. Just as it has been since time immemorial, a trip to Gaili will see you with a mouthful of dirt and a broken axel.
Now I’m not here to rant about the state of development in Nagaland. I’m sure there are many people, who are a lot better informed than me, doing that already. I’m just surprised that the road to Gaili, which is also the road to Peren, the district headquarters, is so shite.
Of course, the reason I may seem overly perturbed by this is because beyond just a bad experience, bad roads have a few more significant tolls. Let me speak of the three major ones.
The first is the cost of goods.
My uncle and aunt have spent the better part of the last decade setting up their mission school in Gaili (do check out the website and support them if you can). And what do you need when you’re setting up a school? Buildings!
The closest supply of construction material to Gaili is in Chumukedima, an up-and-coming seville, back down the same road to the highway and another 10 kilometers towards Dimapur.
The thing is, suppliers know how bad the road to Gaili is, so they always charge a few extra thousand beyond the standard rate to transport any material you might buy from them. These costs add up so much and are such a draw that we bought a truck, a literal Tata or Ashok Leyland massive truck (I don’t even know what they’re called) just because it’s cheaper to do that than to pay for delivery every time you need more bricks or sand.
Take a moment to consider that. Having to buy a truck because of the bad roads.
Now this brings me to the second pitfall of perpetual potholes: You see, I’m not even sure if buying that truck would save us any money. Primarily due to the fact that our vehicles so frequently go bad because of having to drive on these roads. The cost of repair, and the money lost due to the often inoperable state of our vehicles is by far the highest expense we bear thanks to these unpaved “highways”.
I could go on a whole speech about this, but I won’t here. Just use you imagination and think of how often a vehicle will go bad always being off-tarmac and how much extra that costs every year in repairs.
The last, and probably least of the pitfalls of riverbed-roadways (financially speaking) is landscape. Bad roads ruin the view!
You see, a bad road means a lot of exposed dirt, which in turn means there’s a lot of dust being thrown around. All of this dust settles on the surrounding trees and houses and whatnot and you don’t have to go very far in a place like Nagaland to see just how much this affects the aesthetics of a scenery.
Take a moment to look at places nearby, like Meghalaya and now even some parts of Manipur. Those places aren’t more beautiful than Nagaland; certainly not! But there’s no dust everywhere so you get to appreciate the view much better.
Ultimately, when a town looks bad, there’s less people who want to visit it; ergo, less tourism.
Now I’m no economist so I won’t even attempt to try and guess how much money Nagaland loses out on due to its dusty locales. But I’m sure there’s a few opportunities that don’t knock on our door because of it.
What can I say, I’m a stickler for good roads. I like driving, therefore I appreciate a good place to drive on. I also like money and the idea of places developing. And it doesn’t take a genius to understand that one of the first steps to any place’s development is a good road to that area.
So here we are. Today we learned three advantages of a good road:
- It makes things cheaper to buy.
- It lets you use your car for more productive things like going to work or taking you kids to the park, rather than taking it the workshop every fortnight.
- It make the place you live in more beautiful. And who knows, that might just attract some visitors willing to pay for rooms.
- Here’s a bonus: Good roads also encourage more businesses to set up in your area, which is… usually a good thing. There’s a brief paper that goes over it here.
Now the question is, what should we do to get good roads? I don’t know, I’m not the expert. But I think a good place to start would be to learn why we have bad roads in the first place. I find this book especially informative on the matter.
I haven’t even touched the surface when it comes to the issue of bad roads in Nagaland. I know I can’t really expect much change soon because road-wise, some neighborhoods within Dimapur proper are in an even worse state than in Peren. Whatever happens, I’m optimistic about the fate of infrastructure in Nagaland. It appears Manipur’s been doing quite well these past few years, so for now lets just hope that the Kohima-Dimapur highway they’re building right now lasts more than a couple of monsoons.
