Our highways to nowhere: A deliberate scheme to enrich the corrupt

Dec 18, 2025 Letters

Dear Editor,

In a previous missive, I addressed the super-inflated contract pricing of the proposed lanes addition to the “concussion” highway in a simple cost-comparative analysis, I would now endeavour to expose the perpetual cycle of the transactional aspects of these projects. These occurrences are not attributable to human failure or oversight, but are purely by design to enrich a few.

Observations would have revealed a pattern that has been practised by the PPP Administration, where issues are created, allowed to fester until it becomes a “pain-point” for citizens, then in comes the “We care team” springing into action to alleviate the pains. Citizens breathing a sigh of relief, overlooks the optics and plunder.

Editor beyond the fiasco of the Heroes Highway lies the corrupt heart of our national development: this is not an isolated failure, but a deliberate, recurring scheme. This is the calculated playbook of a cartel—complicit officials and their aligned contractors—who systematically replace technocrats with bureaucrats to turn public projects into private piggy banks. The result is a cycle of inflated contracts and engineered failures, designed to plunder the treasury not once, but repeatedly. Our nation deserves far better than these self-serving actors who build personal wealth on the broken foundations of our country’s future.

The already scandalous Heroes Highway project, with its contracts awarded at 40-50% premiums, now reveals the cartel’s signature flaw: intentional misdesign. The plan to add only 4.2km of a third lane, sandwiched in the middle of a 9.4km two-lane corridor, is not an error—it is a “designed guarantee” to create chaos, a built-in justification for the next round of “corrective” contracts.

Traffic engineering is clear: this design creates obstructive “lane drops,” forcing merges that cause bottlenecks and accidents at both ends of the new section. “Lane drops” are a critical concern in traffic engineering due to their significant negative impact on both traffic flow and safety. They inherently reduce roadway capacity by forcing a turbulent merging process, which acts as a major bottleneck and generates traffic shock waves that cause severe congestion and queues, especially during peak hours. Furthermore, safety is compromised by the increased necessity for merging maneuvers, leading to a higher risk of rear-end and sideswipe collisions, particularly when the drops are poorly signed, causing driver confusion and erratic manoeuvres. The problems are often compounded when the dropped lane is located too close to intersections (Massy to Haags Bosch Rds), and sometimes the lane that is dropped is under-utilized by drivers fearing stressful merges, further impacting overall efficiency.

The promised relief is a lie. This glaring flaw exposes the truth: no legitimate traffic impact study was done. Qualified engineers were sidelined. Because the goal was never a solution; it was a transaction. This is the corrupt cycle in action: First, price gouging. Then, a fatally flawed design that ensures failure. Finally, the predictable demand for more billions to “fix” the problem they created. It is a perpetual motion machine of corruption, funded by our taxes.

We must see this not as mere incompetence, but as sophisticated theft. It is a coordinated assault on the public good by a cartel of officials and contractors. They are not building infrastructure; they are constructing a legacy of debt and dysfunction. It is time we halt this machine, demand an all encompassing investigation, followed by penalties for this plunder, and reclaim our right to projects that serve the people, not the pockets of the corrupt.

Sincerely,
Hemdutt Kumar

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Our highways to nowhere: A deliberate scheme to enrich the corrupt

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