I remember landing in Vienna briefly for a stopover enroute to Berlin and seeing from my window seat in the airplane a black serpentine network below. It looked at odds with the verdant plains and appeared to be a stark contrast, albeit only in colour. It was a uniform solid shade of black, an unbroken chain. Alarm (since I had no clue what this could be ..the closest thought of maybe this being a giant oil spill somewhere ..) gave way to wonder and envy, when on my curious enquiry with the stewardess I was told that it was the road network.
Fast forward to a recent journey on the roads back home, specifically between Dimapur and Pangti village via Assam. Save for the short stretch in Assam which was a smooth ride till climb to the hills began. The 80 to 90 odd kilometre drive was achieved with varying speed from 20 kms to a maximum of 40kms.It took as much as six hours to cover this stretch of which two hours was spent waiting for a JCB to arrive from the plains of Assam to clear a landslip where a Tata Sumo had got stuck in the slush compounded by intermittent rain in the past 48 hours.
There is no way anyone can keep an appointment or stick to a schedule in such uncertain circumstances. There were at least one hundred other stranded passengers altogether in the two buses and over a dozen SUV’s loaded with essential items. All of them seemed resigned to their fate so obviously the delay and ‘break’ in the journey on this sector is one they have ‘adjusted’ to. Some of the passengers calmly got off the vehicles carrying their baggage and made the crossing to the other side wading through the muddied slush even as the stranded Sumo and its passengers kept trying to get the SUV off the slippery patch.
The disruption was close to the well inhabited small Bhandari township but disappointingly we could not find even a cup of tea to break the monotony of the waiting or being trapped in our vehicles to avoid getting wet in the pouring rain. The unceremonious delay provided a good opportunity to observe relationship between a road and us the Naga public who use them. Listed below are some of the insights born out of a ‘time passing’ game.
Contrary to the amazing shining black serpent necklace of the roads in Vienna, the roads in Nagaland to my mind’s eye suddenly appeared to be like a wider version of a trail inside any forest. A trail overgrown with weeds because it is disuse and can get blocked with a fallen tree trunk or worse still All roads in Nagaland are vulnerable to the vagaries of nature. But even after knowing this, not a single road in the town or highways across the state are supported by proper drainage. The roads inevitably serve as the runway for the run off from the hillsides. So much time is wasted of the lives of the hard working rural population waiting in uncertainty and in transition on business, medical reasons or for social causes. Can roads in between two villages be monitored by the villagers and in the event of a landslip causing a road block can we not develop a system to relay the information to traffic approaching on both sides of the blocked road. Every person, household, shopkeeper, uses one. Maybe a Road Block Alert Squad can be pressed into service especially during the monsoon leading to an increasing frequency of landslides in the state. They could be of vital assistance in times of a natural disaster as well especially in caring for the sick and injured.
Either we learn to turn things around that the road shows up or it will have us turn around and we will never get where we want to.
