The tragic death of 49-year-old Chhaya Purab exposes the horrifying consequences of corruption, inefficiency, and mismanagement in India’s infrastructure projects. Chhaya, critically injured after a tree fell on her, was being shifted from Saphale, Palghar, to Hinduja Hospital in Mumbai.
She was administered anaesthesia to ease her pain during the journey, which was expected to take around 2.5 hours. Instead, due to traffic congestion, chaos, and the nightmarish road conditions on NH 48, it took three hours just to reach Virar. By then, she had woken up, screaming in unbearable pain. The ambulance managed to reach only Mira Road after four agonising hours, where she was declared dead on arrival.
This stretch of NH 48, between mumbai and Gujarat, has already seen over ₹500 crores spent on so-called “white topping” work, which was touted as a long-lasting road solution. However, that project not only caused endless traffic snarls during its execution but has now been abandoned in favour of mastic asphalt — essentially undoing years of disruption and wasting colossal amounts of taxpayer money. The National Highways Authority of india (NHAI) has now claimed to have “blacklisted” the contractor responsible, but that raises pressing questions: What about the Defect Liability Period (DLP) that ensures the contractor’s accountability? Who is recovering the public funds wasted on a failed project?
For Chhaya’s grieving family, and for countless motorists enduring this man-made chaos daily, the issue goes beyond poor governance — it is about human lives lost due to reckless planning, execution, and oversight. Her death is a stark reminder that infrastructure corruption is not a harmless administrative lapse; it kills. Blacklisting a contractor is not justice, nor does it restore the lost lives. Citizens are now demanding a thorough audit of the project, strict accountability for those responsible, and an urgent revamp of the NH 48 corridor to prevent more such heart-wrenching tragedies.
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