Spark 3: Someone Actually Fixed The Roads. Here's How.
This January, Swarajya publishes the Renaissance Issue—twenty-five investigations asking why India underperforms its potential and who figured out how to fix it. Here's Spark 03.
The problem nobody wrote down
For decades, Indian cities applied highway engineering standards to urban roads. Think about that. Standards designed for vehicles moving at speed between cities, applied to streets where people live, shop, and walk.
The result? Roads designed as if pedestrians did not exist. Footpaths as afterthoughts—whatever space remained after vehicle lanes were allocated. Utilities laid wherever convenient, dug up whenever necessary, the same stretches of asphalt torn open year after year.
Everyone complained. Nobody fixed it.
Then someone did
In 2011, a Bengaluru non-profit called Jana Urban Space Foundation did something radical: they wrote down what a properly designed urban road should look like.
The document was called TenderSURE. It specified things that should have been obvious but had never been codified:
Footpaths wide enough for two people to walk abreast. Utilities organised in corridors under the footpaths. Inspection chambers every twenty metres so maintenance wouldn’t require excavation. Single contracts with one entity accountable for the entire road.
A BBMP consultant wrote that TenderSURE would cause “urban decay.”
Then the roads got built.
The numbers
228 per cent more pedestrians on TenderSURE roads.
113 per cent more women.
The phase one contractor did not clean the drain once in five years. The roads simply worked.
Today: 100 kilometres in Bengaluru. 200 kilometres under construction in Uttar Pradesh. The model spreading to Odisha, Meghalaya, Assam.
The solution was not revolutionary. Someone just had to write it down and refuse to back off.
This is Spark 03
A spark illuminates a problem. Identifies who figured it out. Chronicles a builder.
The Renaissance Issue carries twenty-five of them—across defence, science, economy, infrastructure, culture, and governance. Some illuminate failures. Others, like this one, show what success looks like.
Print subscribers will get a copy soon.
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The more I read about the civic conditions the more I am convinced the utter failure of the UPSC outputs. They are totally a waste, drain on resources and clueless. Arrogant to the core, epitome of corruption and hypocrites , for close 80 years they have ruined the nation. Not one taluk can be rated as world standard. The worst part is they continue to be a drain even after retirement but sucking so much of pension as well from the tax payers. Leeches and termites.
Although the TenderSURE was conceptually fine, as a resident of Bengaluru I do not feel deep thought has gone into long term sustainability of these pedestrian walkways. Even today I see footpaths ripped open after completion for some reason or the other (within months sometimes) and left un-reinstated after work. I think this is a case of 'over governed and under administered'