Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan is in the news again, and for all the wrong reasons. His recent self-praise while on a US visit extolling the quality of roads in his home state has come in for intense criticism and online ridicule.
"When I got down at the Washington Airport and travelled on roads, I felt the roads in Madhya Pradesh are better than the United States", Chouhan said on Tuesday as he addressed media on the sidelines of the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum meet in Washington.
A fact-check of Shivraj’s claim proves otherwise.
To a question by Biju Janata Dal’s Lok Sabha MP about road accidents in India due to potholes, the then Union Minister of State for Road Transport Pon Radhakrishnan, based on 2015 data, replied that while the country recorded as many as 10,876 road accidents resulting from potholes, the number was the highest in Chouhan’s state.
A total of 3,070 pothole-related road accidents were reported from Madhya Pradesh, a little over 28% of the total such accidents. MP was followed by Maharashtra with 1,867 accidents and Uttar Pradesh with 1,196 accidents.
Even so-called economically backward states like Bihar fared better on the count with 402 pothole-related accidents. Rajasthan had 309 such accidents and West Bengal 362.
Even hilly states of the North-East, where heavy rainfall and water current constantly washes away roads and creates potholes, fared much better.
Assam had a mere 24 pothole-related accidents, while Arunachal had 34 and Manipur 31. Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland recorded zero pothole-related accidents.
Mountainous Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh too logged zero such accidents.
Even if one ignores roads in the hinterlands, the roads of capital Bhopal remain in the news constantly due to their poor condition. In August last year, Aam Aadmi Party cadres with an aim to highlight pathetic road condition in the city had planted saplings in potholes and named them after politicians in the state.
As he boasted on his state’s roads, Chouhan perhaps also forgot what his own party colleague and Union Minister of Road Transport and Highway, Nitin Gadkari, said in July last year. That was in Washington too.
Interacting with Indian journalists after his meeting with US Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, Gadkari had said he was very disturbed by the state of road safety in India. While acknowledging that road safety is a crucial issue back home, he said with better innovative technology and software in intelligent traffic management, India would collaborate with United States to make its roads safer.
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