Nobody cares for the feelings of a road. With each pothole on the highways, every single traffic jam in the city, and every has-been trail-like shadow in the hills, a road gets cursed and vilified. An angry “yeh wala road hi kharaab hai” (this road itself is bad) outburst is the most benign of them.

What if the road isn’t the villain, but the tragic hero in our collective drama of dysfunction? After all, the road doesn’t spit paan. It doesn’t jump red lights or double park in the neatly encroached space outside houses. The potholed, chaotic, crime-infested, rage-inducing mess isn’t the fault of a surface. It’s perhaps a symptom of a deeper national malaise: A chronic, criminal and unapologetic lack of civic sense.

A young IPS trainee recently asked my advice — no, I did nothing to deserve this honour — on one thing that India needed fixed urgently for its dream drive to development. Between the bites of croissant, I could only mumble, “Roads. Fix our roads”.

A 2022 study by the National Academies in Washington DC, on pedestrian behaviour in India revealed that around “44.6% of........

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