All roads lead to Viksit Bharat: a dream that’s fading

Every evening, on the exit from Sector 37 in Faridabad onto the KMP expressway, cars come at me the wrong way.

- JYOTHI KRISHNAMOORTHY

It is not the odd reckless driver, but the apparent norm. This is so at every exit, where the road layout offers no safe option. Crashes are frequent; I read of them almost daily, a steady drip of dread.

One was reported by The Tribune on 28 November 2025. On a service road in Faridabad linked to the Delhi-Mumbai Expressway, a sedan returning from a wedding made a U-turn under a flyover near Sector 14; a speeding SUV slammed into it, and Mahesh, a workshop operator, died on the spot.

Here is the contradiction of our moment. We are aiming for Viksit Bharat—or developed-country status—by 2047, yet what unfolds daily on Indian roads is a story of regression over progress, a country slipping backward one avoidable death at a time.

None of this is bad luck. NH-148NA, a spur that takes Delhi and Noida traffic through Faridabad to the expressway, was designed without asking how local residents would use it. Where colonies open onto it, the exits are either misplaced or missing, so a driver gets on, finds no exit and doubles back into oncoming traffic. Thoughtless road design did not just permit fatalities, it has made them predictable.