ASPHALT AND THE ART OF SHARING

ARVIND LAKSHMISHA

For as long as we have imagined development, we have imagined roads. Roads that lead to schools, clinics, and markets. Roads that wind through villages and hills, connecting people to possibilities. In countless policy documents and political speeches, roads have been both the metaphor and the metric of progress.

And why not? Roads mean connection. They reduce the time and cost of accessing essential services. They signal the arrival of the state, the market, and sometimes, hope. In India, programmes, like the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana, have linked remote hamlets to larger economic systems. Children attend school more regularly, ambulances reach faster, and farmers gain access to wider markets.


But roads are not just about cars or concrete. They are shared spaces—used by pedestrians, cyclists, street vendors, cattle, children walking to school, and elders taking an evening round. They have always been part of everyday life, not just transport corridors. And yet, across Indian cities, these spaces are changing. Roads are becoming congested, narrowed by parked vehicles, and increasingly unfriendly to anyone not in a car. Pedestrians are squeezed out, and cyclists are unsafe.Flyovers and highways promise smoother travel, but often just shift the traffic jams a few kilometres ahead. Roads are everywhere, yet movement feels harder.

There have been countless tweets about traffic woes in cities like Bangalore—some funny, others in exasperation. Public transport is certainly part of the solution, but what about our own habits? The failure to follow lane discipline, the lack of driving etiquette, the tearing hurry that pushes drivers straight into deadlocks that can be avoided if someone had simply stopped for another to pass. We talk about road expansion, but rarely about road behaviour.

Thinking of roads as commons gives us a different lens. Like water tanks, grazing fields, or village greens, roads are used by many kinds of people every day—but they are rarely planned or maintained as shared spaces. Everyone uses them, but hardly anyone feels responsible for them. And when there is no collective care, things begin to fall apart.

This is the tragedy of the commons, made visible in asphalt and fumes. We see it clearly: footpaths eaten up by encroachments, vehicles parked across walkways, shortcuts carved through forests, and highways cutting through flood-prone or fragile areas. What is meant to bring people together ends up creating friction—or even harm.

There’s another irony here. Many of the roads we use today have replaced older commons—wetlands, tanks, or open grounds. These were spaces that absorbed rain, recharged groundwater, and cooled the air. We built over them in the name of progress, without thinking of what we were losing. Now, with each heavy rain, the consequences plague us: floods, clogged drains, and sinking roads.

The road is a physical surface, yes—but also a living space. In some places, trees still arch over them, vendors still line them, and children still play cricket on them. In others, they have become heat islands of unbroken tar and dust, hostile to anyone not encased in steel and glass. The difference lies in how we treat them.

To move forward, we must reclaim roads as commons—not in a nostalgic sense, but as functional, inclusive, living spaces. Roads that work with landscapes, not against them. That account for slopes, rain, roots, and routes. That leave space for walkers, cyclists, buses, vendors, and trees—not just cars.

And we must plan them collectively. Engineers, yes—but also ecologists, geologists, urban designers, and the communities which live beside them. Especially in ecologically sensitive or indigenous areas, local voices must shape how roads are designed, built, and maintained.

True development does not just build roads, but relationships—between people, land, and the spaces in between. It listens to the land, to the people, to memory. It remembers where the lakes were and where the elephants still walk.

Roads do not just take us somewhere. They remind us of what we share—and if we keep building without care, we risk losing not just ground, but direction.

(ArvindLakshmisha is faculty at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru. Views are personal)