Letter from India - A Roadway From Hope to Sorrow - NYTimes.com

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By AKASH KAPUR

PERUNTHURAI, INDIA — E. Vinayagam remembers when the country road outside his village ran through a forest. When Vinayagam, born in 1947, was a boy, he and his friends were scared to go to the road at night; the forest was thick, and it was rumored to be haunted.

Vinayagam remembers when the road became a highway. A group of surveyors showed up one morning with their equipment. They were marking what would become the East Coast Road — an ambitious highway project, financed in part by the Asian Development Bank, that runs nearly 800 kilometers, about 500 miles, along the southeast coast of India.

The East Coast Road, or ECR, was built in the late ’90s. Vinayagam was an impoverished agricultural laborer at the time. The highway changed his life. He set up a thatch tea shop by the side of the road. It was a humble establishment, but traffic was picking up, and the thatch hut was soon a two-story concrete structure that served branded cold drinks and fresh fruit juices.

Land prices were picking up, too. Vinayagam got interested in real estate. He started small, helping some of his customers at the tea shop find plots for beach homes. He closed a few big deals for doctors and movie stars in Chennai, just over an hour’s drive from his village of Perunthurai. He built a new house; he bought some land of his own.

Today, Vinayagam exudes the easy confidence of a self-made man. The person who introduced us said of him: “This is a guy who 15 years ago didn’t even know how to open a car door; now he drives his own fancy car.” Vinayagam parks his red Scorpio jeep outside his tea shop. It gleams in the harsh coastal sun.

Amid the reams of policy documents and prescriptions on the Indian economy, there is one common refrain: The country needs better infrastructure. India’s airports and electricity lines and roads are woefully inadequate. The government is seeking $70 billion of investment for roads alone in the next three years. It argues that better infrastructure could help promote economic development in the same way that technology has done.

A drive along the ECR, which runs a short distance from my house, would appear to confirm this premise. The road is lined with commercial activity, restaurants and mechanic shops and beach resorts that have dramatically altered the horizons of local villagers — men like Vinayagam, who at one time seemed destined for nothing more than agricultural work, or women like A. Uma, who I met in the village of Venangapattam, where she had recently set up a small provisions store.

She is a 37-year-old widow, a mother of three, who used to get by with part-time work on her neighbors’ farms. But the farms dried up, she told me, and times were tough. Her store, built opposite a new marriage hall that attracts customers from as far as Chennai, promises a fresh start.

Down the road from Uma’s store, a boating center draws busloads of noisy tourists. They paddle in rowboats and picnic along the edge of stunningly beautiful backwaters; they sustain a thriving economy that has only recently come into existence.

The tourists also leave behind plastic bags and paper cups and plates. This is the detritus of development, spread along the coast like an insidious confetti. A decade ago, when the ECR was being built, many activists objected. They protested the trees that would be cut, and the social and environmental disruption that they said would inevitably ensue. Today, the backwaters, home to delicate mangroves that protect the shore, are choking. Water tables are declining, and village ponds are silting up. The ECR has brought too much development. The land can’t bear it.

A little farther on from the boating center, in the village of Panichamedu, farmers talk about abandoning agricultural work, selling their property, moving to the city. They complain about wells that have become empty, and rising salinity in those that still have water. Large tracts of land that once would have been green with rice are fallow.

Fishermen in the village bemoan the prawn hatcheries that dot the coast. The owners of these hatcheries extol the ECR, crediting it with cutting travel times to their markets and boosting business. But their success comes at a price: The chemicals and antibiotics they use are polluting the groundwater and even, some fishermen claim, the ocean.

Not too long ago, when development was a colder, more technocratic enterprise, the types of harm caused by the ECR would have been dismissed as necessary collateral damage. Imbued with a missionary zeal, the development establishment threw around phrases like: “You have to break some eggs to make an omelet.”

Development is a more sensitive field these days. Most infrastructure projects are preceded by environmental impact assessment reports intended to help minimize collateral damage. But whenever I drive along the coast, I can’t help feeling that the omelet analogy is alive and well — that ecologies and livelihoods are still being broken, and that the price of progress is often paid in human lives.

In Perunthurai, Vinayagam told me about all the people he knew who had been killed by traffic on the ECR. At least 50 people have died in the area since the road was built; he’s lost five relatives. His uncle’s son died six months ago, his cousin died a year and a half ago, and his nephew also died recently, when his motorcycle was squeezed between a truck and a bus.

We were sitting under a banyan tree by the side of the road when Vinayagam told me about all this destruction. The sun was high and his car was shining. He shrugged his shoulders. He said: “When a road comes, high speed will come naturally. No one can do anything about it. This road has changed my life. Without it, I would still be just a farmer.”

Afghan Road Project Shows Bumps in Drive for Stability

By PETER WONACOTT

GHORMACH DISTRICT, Afghanistan -- Khalid Khan's small construction firm was supposed to build a road here that would open his strife-scarred land to commerce and improve its prospects for peace. Instead he wound up in the hands of the Taliban, hanging upside down.

On an April evening, says Mr. Khan, about 20 armed militants broke into his home and marched him and 14 of his employees to a remote village. The 30-year-old contractor says he was accused of helping the Americans and shoved into a well waist-deep with water. At other times during his two-month captivity he was chained to a roof by his feet. Ultimately, relatives raised a $100,000 ransom.

"I lost my money, my health," says Mr. Khan, who estimates he shed more than 60 pounds in captivity. "I lost everything for this project."

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Kate Brooks for The Wall Street Journal

Construction workers on the Shomali Plains paved a road that links to the ring road.

The project in question: paving 3.7 miles over a dusty donkey trail traversing the wheat fields and parched riverbeds of impoverished northwest Afghanistan. It's a tiny piece of a 1,925-mile rim of asphalt -- called the national ring road -- that aims to connect Afghanistan's cities.

The highway has become a litmus test of President Hamid Karzai's ability to govern the country. The final links of the $2.5 billion project -- or roughly 10% of the total length -- are being held up in part by the Taliban's attacks on construction sites and workers. In the face of a hardened insurgency, Mr. Karzai has struggled to show he can build and defend the infrastructure needed for a viable state.

Ramazan Bashardost, a popular candidate who runs his campaign out of a nomad's tent, may force Afghan elections into a second round. Courtesy of Reuters.

"The government of Afghanistan needs to demonstrate it can have a road network and can keep it open. The insurgents recognize that and are working against it," says Brig. Gen. Frank McKenzie, a staff member for Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan. The ring road, adds Gen. McKenzie, "is a symbol of governance."

The attacks on the road, including bombings, kidnappings and drive-by shootings, reflect broader security woes underlying Afghanistan's shaky transition to democratic rule ahead of the Aug. 20 national election, which Mr. Karzai is favored to win. According to internal government estimates, about 14% of the country's polling stations are considered too dangerous for people to vote.

A reminder of the volatile situation came Saturday morning, as a Taliban suicide bomber detonated an explosives-laden car near the heavily fortified headquarters of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's Afghanistan task force in Kabul. The bomb killed at least seven people.

One of Mr. Karzai's challengers, Ashraf Ghani, a former finance minister, says if it had been completed earlier, the national ring road could have been a potent counterinsurgency weapon -- by generating trade, employment and support for the government. Instead, says Mr. Ghani, "it's become a road of broken promises."

Project backers say insurgents have stepped up attacks on the road to sow discord between foreign donors, who are mostly funding construction, and Afghan officials, who are responsible for the police guarding the road.

"We are eager to work in places where we don't get shot at," says Craig Steffensen, country chief for the Asian Development Bank, the single largest donor for Afghanistan's ring road. "We aren't eager to work in places where we aren't sure we can go home the next day."

Since the 1960's, Afghan planners have dreamed of a ring road to transport the country out of poverty. A highway system encircling the poor and landlocked nation could help farmers, factories and the country's resource-rich mines get goods to the market. It could ultimately position Afghanistan as a bridge between its Central Asian neighbors and the big markets of Iran, India and China. That would make trade in copper, coal, oil and gas, as well as fruits, nuts and wheat, viable alternatives to opium, now the country's biggest export.

Yet three decades of war prevented that dream from being realized. It wasn't until after the 2001 U.S.-led overthrow of the Taliban regime that the country mustered the money from foreign donors and expertise to refurbish the parts that had been built and finish the rest. The U.S. government, whose aid arm estimates that two-thirds of Afghanistan live within 31 miles of the road, pumped $492 million into rehabilitating the southern arch from Kabul in the east to Herat in the west. The ADB has contributed an additional $900 million.

Construction came with heavy costs. Between 2003 and early 2008, 162 contractors lost their lives building the southern half of the highway's ring, according to a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, a congressional watchdog that has studied the U.S. Agency for International Development's projects in Afghanistan. The report didn't specify how the workers were killed, only that the death toll made it the most dangerous of any other USAID-funded project in the country.

Parts of the road have had to be rebuilt after they were completed. In May, USAID announced it had rebuilt a strip between Kabul and Kandahar that had been "mined, bombed and pockmarked by neglect." The section, which goes through the heart of Taliban territory, remains one of the most dangerous in Afghanistan to drive.

The northern half of the ring has proved just as perilous and costly. The ADB says it has confronted repeated security-related delays and cost overruns. After a string of kidnappings and killings, the bank recently agreed to pay an additional $2.5 million to train and dispatch nearly 500 police to guard road crews.

Top Afghan officials maintain security is good enough for the road to speed ahead. In an interview, the minister of finance, Hazrat Omar Zakhilwal, blamed a contractor, China Railway Shisiju Group Corp., for the two stalled sections in north Faryab Province.

"We need to apply pressure on the Chinese," said Mr. Zakhilwal, who is also the chief economic adviser to the president. "They are going awfully slow."

In an indication of the security woes bedeviling the roadways, Mr. Zakhilwal arrived at the interview late -- after the Taliban blew up an oil tanker ahead of him, he says, and fired down from a mountain at his convoy. The finance minister dismissed the attack with a wave of the hand.

China Rail executives didn't respond to faxed and emailed questions about the status of the ring road or the April kidnapping of its contractor, Mr. Khan. In 2004, China Rail lost 11 employees in a late-night attack on its compound in northeastern Kunduz Province. The company has estimated that it's been targeted in 10 other terrorist attacks.

The ring road's potential benefits are on display in Maimana, the capital of Faryab. With a new portion of the road from the east connecting the town with the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, goods have poured in from abroad: shampoos from Iran, soap from Ukraine, rice from India and knockoff British perfumes made in China.

Fruit prices have fallen by half from a year ago, say merchants, mainly due to a drop in transport costs. Mullah Mohammed Latif, a Maimana vegetable salesman, says he used to take at least four days to make the round trip by truck to Mazar-e-Sharif. En route, he says, he would lose large amounts of his melons and grapes to the sun and the hands of hungry thieves. Now he hires a taxi to do the trip in a day.

The brisk produce sales have filtered down to farmers in the area, so that local stall owners are now adjusting to a novel phenomenon: disposable income. "People are coming to Maimana to spend money," exalts Sakhi Mohammed, sitting inside a roadside store selling Chinese-made electric kettles and children's clothing.

The road going west from Maimana, skirting the border of Turkmenistan, is a different story. Much of it remains unpaved and construction on the China Rail sections has slowed to a standstill.

In July, Mr. Steffensen, the ADB's 51-year-old country chief, led a small team to the China Rail compound in the town of Qaisar to try to kick-start construction. An armored convoy of Norwegian troops escorted the team past the rusted carcasses of Soviet tanks, the relics of an earlier war.

At the Chinese camp, the ADB team sat around a conference table with the China Rail executives. In the middle: a map showing the project's torpid progress.

Chen Zhe, a China Rail manager, said his company underestimated costs and the level of security needed. He said the road sections that were supposed to be finished by the end of last year are only 20% complete.

Mr. Steffensen said top Afghan officials were angry as they watched the nearby South Korean crew working feverishly and not China Rail. ADB was now paying $50,000 a week for the extra Afghan police, he said, apparently to guard idle construction equipment. Build the road and worry about money later, advised Mr. Steffenson. "Everybody wants to see action, big action," he said. "We need to haul a -- ."

Mr. Chen cleared his throat. "We will try our best to finish this project," he said.

Mr. Khan's kidnapping had been a major setback. The crew's abduction stalled a crucial 3.7-mile stretch in Ghormach district, roughly 70 miles from Maimana, and sent shivers of anxiety through the entire project team. Barricaded in their compounds, Chinese executives complained they could hear gunshots at night.

In Ghormach, Mr. Khan said, he had been living in a house next to a police checkpoint, but the Taliban were able to move into his house and then march his crew into the hills without a shot being fired.

Asked about the lack of police response, Abdul Khalil Andarabi, Faryab's police chief, said investigators later found that the kidnappers had help from inside the police force. He says the police arrested two suspects as well as some relatives of the kidnappers.

In interviews, Mr. Khan recounted his two-month ordeal, the broad outlines of which were confirmed by the ADB, the China Rail team and Muhammad Ajmal Jami, an engineer who was also kidnapped. Mr. Khan says he knew he was a ripe target -- reviled for working on a foreign-backed project and seen as rich enough to afford a big ransom. Yet he says he almost fooled his captors into releasing him. He told them his name was Abdullah and that he drove a gravel truck. They initially demanded a relatively paltry $8,000 ransom.

But just before his uncle arrived with the money, the Taliban discovered Mr. Khan's real identity. He says they took the $8,000 and then asked for $300,000 more. Mr. Khan was forced into the well. After 10 days, Mr. Khan says, the Taliban chained him up by his feet to the roof. When he asked for water, they poured it down his throat, choking him.

Mr. Khan was later marched to a spot where another engineer had been executed. He was told to say his final prayer and then someone fired a shot at the ground between his legs. Another evening, he knelt down in the same spot and felt a bullet pass his cheek. Both times, he was ordered to call his mother afterward and plead to hurry up with the money.

Mr. Khan recalls his mind going numb. "Because I worked for the Americans," he remembers the young men telling him, "Islamic law permitted them to kill me."

The Taliban eventually reduced the ransom to $100,000 and a Toyota Land Cruiser. Borrowing from friends and family, Mr. Khan's uncle handed over the cash and the car in June.

His problems weren't over after the release. Hoping to extract another $100,000, the Taliban has held onto another of his engineers.

Despite the dangers, Mr. Khan's team has resumed construction near the site of their kidnapping. Mr. Khan himself remains in Kabul, wavering over whether to return to the site, or leave the country. Even in Kabul, he says, he fears he is a target.

"It's not difficult to shoot me or send a suicide bomber to Kabul," says Mr. Khan. "There are still plenty of Taliban here."

—Habib Zahori, Anand Gopal and Sue Feng contributed to this article.

Write to Peter Wonacott at peter.wonacott@wsj.com