The Great Pot-hole Controversy

The Great Pot-hole Controversy

So how many pot-holes do Mumbai’s roads actually have? 18, 20,895 as media and citizens claim or just 40 as per Brihan-mumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) would like us to believe? I decided to get to the bottom of this. After-all how deep can a pot-hole be? I am not sure if Arnab Goswami wants to know that or not but the nation might just want to know.

I decided to tackle my old friend Gulu. Now, Gulu is one of those guys who love to convert threats into opportunities.  He has no MBA or any other formal management degree but  he has consistently used all tricks that they don’t teach you at Harvard and I am sure has invented dozens of his own that would leave Mark McCormack more than a bit dazed.  I will refer to Gulu only as Gulu to protect his identity.

Gulu is now one of the top bureaucrats in BMC and supposedly controls the road repairs. He was busy as usual but called me to Hyatt where he was attending a meeting of CHOR (Confederation of Highway Organizers  and  Repairers) a body of construction companies engaged in, you guessed it, road-building and repairs. As I entered the lobby, I saw him scurrying towards me.

Me : “”Hi Gulu”

Gulu : “Hi, Old chap. I am terribly busy you know. Have to attend another meeting at Renaissance. Why don’t you jump in my car. We can catch up on our way. “

The car which came to pick us was a BMW i8.

Me : “Wow, Gulu. Didn’t know BMC provided such cars to the execs.”

Gulu : “ No No,  this is not my official car”

Me : “ Well, even better. I know the salaries of BMC staff had risen quite well over last few years but I didn’t know they had reached this stratospheric region.”

Gulu :  No No, this is not my car.  We poor BMC guys can’t afford such luxuries you know. This is my wife’s car”

Me : “ Oh I see.” Obviously impressed. “What does she do?” Fully expecting to be told that she was some top dog venture capitalist or a banker or maybe Gulu had lucked out on a very rich father-in-law.  Some people have all the luck.

Gulu : “ She is a consultant”  

Me : “ Consultant?”. This was getting too much as most consultants I know use that as a cover to convey  that they are free birds  and available for some gainful employment. I am yet to come across a consultant who could flash a BMW i8.

Gulu : “Yes, She is a Consultant to ABCD Projects Ltd”. (Name changed for obvious reasons)

Me : “ABCD? Aren’t they the ones which keep on getting huge construction and road-building projects everywhere? She must be a terrific engineer to be consulting such a big company.”

Gulu : “ No no not an a engineer. She is good, no doubt. She is a vaastu consultant and a tarot card reader. In fact she is so good that she just makes a single visit to ABCD office every month and finishes her work in less than an hour. This is her car which I get to use.”

Too stunned to digest this, I quietly got into the car, making a mental note to tell my children and all and sundry nephews and nieces to give up all this engineering and medical rubbish and start taking vaastu classes instead. 

Gulu : “ Ok. What did you want to see me about?”

Me : “Er..  Gulu this is about the pot-holes.  The roads are just full of them and you guys are insisting that there are only 40 pot-holes on Mumbai roads.  This is preposterous you know” I was now getting into my responsible citizen role quite seriously. “You guys have spent thousands of crores of rupees; literally poured them down the drain. It’s the citizen’s money, you know.”

 Gulu : “ I know I know dear. There are a lot of misgivings about these pot-holes. Here.” He pulled out his laptop and showed me a map of the city which had clear markings labeled “pot-holes”.  

Gulu : “ As you can see there are exactly 40 as we mentioned in yesterday’s Press Conference. “ 

Just at that point of time, the car passed over what appeared to be a major pot-holes although Gulu’s map showed presence of no pot-holes on that particular stretch of road.  

Me : “ And pray what was that?”

Gulu : “ That was just a rumbler that is routinely put up for slowing the traffic near a junction.

Right on the cue came another jolt which rattled the car and my bones.  I looked at Gulu quizzically.

Gulu responded coolly “Oh this. Let me see. And typing furiously on his laptop came up with a different map “Ah, yes this is a ‘tumbler-hole’.  You see the whole controversy has arisen because we keep on talking at cross-purposes. There has been a lot of confusion about what constitutes a pot-hole. So we have now taken steps to define each type of hole. We have now classified the holes on the road as ‘thimble-holes’, ‘tumbler-holes’ , ‘pot-holes’ and so on, each with specific  well-defined size range commensurate with size of container each hole can comfortably accommodate.  In order to standardize that we have defined the sizes of containers that could be safely dipped into the hole eg a pot-hole is defined to have dimensions of  30 cm by 30 cm and 30 cms deep with a plus / minus of 5 cm on each dimension. With this strictly defined classification, now there is no confusion and we can safely state that there are only 40 pot-holes in the city. Unfortunately the media refuses to understand such a simple thing and keeps on issuing grossly inflated figures of pot-holes.”

I was speechless. What clarity of thought! What a scientific way of tackling problems! As the management experts keep on telling us “first define the problem”. Utterly brilliant. Then everything else has to fall in place; I mean in right size of holes. No confusion any more.  

“Secondly, about the money spent you talk about” clearly Gulu was just warming up “the money could not have been better spent. As you know the BMC has a lot of reserves (more than Rs 30,000 crs  - a fact which I knew) and with all this threat of recession and slow-down in the world economy, we are doing our bit to pump-prime the economy. You know what happens to economies which consistently run up surpluses. Don’t you? I mean, look at Japan, look at China for that matter. It’s all Macro-economics 101 you know. All our expenditure will go a long way to boost our GDP. Media should be happy that we are contributing to the national economy in a big way.”      

I was stunned to hear such brilliant exposition about GDP and such intricate aspects of international finance matters. My admiration for Gulu and the dedication with which he was pursuing national interests had gone sky-high. I was now fully convinced that all this pot-hole controversy was all a media conspiracy. All done to achieve an increase their TRPs and poor guys like me and you were getting exercised for no reason.

Suddenly I was brought to earth as I saw a bike rider who was a little ahead of us disappear in a water-filled hole. Just the top of his helmet was visible above the road level.

Me : “My God, Gulu did you see that?  The guy is totally submerged in water.”

Gulu : “ Yeah. That’s what we call a ‘tub-hole’, 200 cms long x 100 cms wide and at least 50 cms deep, basically the size of your bath tub. This one seems to be deeper than minimum prescribed.” 

Me : “ You are not worried? That guy may lose a limb or even his life.”

Gulu : “ We will need to invest Rs 10 crore in that hole. Think how much it will add to the GDP.”

Just then we came across a SUV stuck in a hole up to its bonnet.

Gulu : “ This is what we call a ‘tank-hole’, 500 cms x 300 cms and at least a 100 cms deep, enough for a swim you know. We haven’t had too many of these, but I guess a 100 crs should take care of it.”

I was about to tell Gulu to pull over so that I could get off. All this was too much for me. Just then Fate gave one of her quirky crooked smiles. There was a 40 ft container trundling along a few meters ahead of the car and a MSRTC Volvo trying to overtake it, suddenly both the large vehicles and a few smaller ones just disappeared from our sight amidst cries and chaos and a huge plume of dust. Luckily we could stop in time and found ourselves staring at a seemingly bottom-less pit which had opened up in the middle of the highway and had swallowed those vehicles.

Gulu appeared a bit taken aback. “A sink–hole!!!. Can you imagine?” there was awe and wonder in his voice. But BMC chooses their execs well. No emergency can be too big for them. Gulu recovered pretty quickly.

Gulu :  “ There was one in Florida recently and one in Guatemala before that. I didn’t think in my wildest dreams that we could have one. This one is at least 10,000 crs. We are sure to record a double-digit growth in GDP this year!!!”  

LazyBee

30^th September 2016