Tyler Hicks/The New York Times - A woman crossing a stretch of India's improved national highway system in a village in the northern state of Rajasthan.
All those new roads, and all those new cars. Guess they won't be changing their mind and joining Kyoto anytime soon.
Good for them. Let their stone-age, backward-ass, terrorism-supporting neighbor to the west rot in hell
Near the end of this long article:
***.............As Ms. Devi was lugging wet concrete into her mud house, Mr. Rao, the project manager, was counting the days until he could take highway, train and plane, and escape for a holiday in America.
He had three daughters living there, one a computer engineer, the other two married to computer engineers. Most of his engineers - almost all, like him, from the southern state of Andhra Pradesh - had relatives in America, too.
If Bihar was enemy territory for the professionals roosting in rugged camps to build India's dream highway, America was the promised land. India's traffic with America has never been higher; sending a child there had become a middle-class "craze," in one engineer's word.
The founding elites of India were British-educated. Today, the ambitious young pursue degrees from Wharton and Stanford, with some 80,000 Indian students in the United States. Two million Indians live there, working as doctors, software engineers, and motel owners along America's highways.
No surprise, then, that America has shaped the ideas of what India's highway can be. Mr. Rao's deputy, B. K. Rami Reddy, also with a daughter in America, was nearly breathless as he described one stretch of finished roadway in southern India: "You really feel like you are in the U.S., it is so nice. When you go on that road, you feel you are somewhere else."
The implicit effort to make India "somewhere else," more like America, more of the first world and less of the third, girds this entire project. With the highway and India's accompanying rise, Mr. Rao predicted that by 2010 or 2020, "Indians may not feel the need to go abroad."
"This highway will really change the face of India," he said. ..............***
This is good to hear. Look's like India is serious about being a first world power. These roads will increase the quality of life for the population of India.
Have mixed feelings about arable land being used for highways. With India's growing population, land is not a dispensable commodity.
Also, the writer got the name of Calcutta wrong - it is Kolkata now.
Anyone from India - are you seeing this roadwork in reality?
ping
A large percentage of the U.S. highway system was started during Eishower's presidency. He was very impressed with the Germany's Autobahn and other highway systems that were used for the purpose of moving military hardware during the war.