संवाद # 321: India's legendary bureaucrat explains poor quality of new expressways | RC Sinha

Dr Ramesh Chandra Sinha is a 1962-batch IAS officer whose six-decade career produced some of the most consequential infrastructure projects in modern India.As Vice Chairman and Managing Director of the Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation (MSRDC) under PWD Minister Nitin Gadkari, he built India's first world-class expressway — the 95-km Mumbai-Pune Expressway — completing it in 36 months at a cost of Rs 1,600 crore, which was Rs 50 crore below the MSRDC's own estimate and roughly half of Reliance's competing bid that came with 78 concessions. He raised Rs 2,400 crore from the open market through non-convertible debentures on an equity base of just Rs 5 crore, creating a financing model that other states later sought to replicate.Alongside the Expressway, he delivered 50-plus flyovers across the Mumbai Metropolitan Region with an average construction time of around 30 months, along with numerous rail over-bridges and town bypasses.Earlier, as Vice Chairman and Managing Director of CIDCO under Chief Minister Sharad Pawar, he transformed Vashi from a settlement of 30,000 people into the foundation of Navi Mumbai — building its dam, water supply, six-lane road to Mumbai, railway connectivity (with CIDCO funding 67 percent of the capital cost), modern railway stations, and the iconic Seawoods NRI Complex which sold out worldwide in nine days.He also developed New Nashik, New Aurangabad, New Nanded and the district headquarters of Sindhudurg, and engineered the shifting of Mumbai's wholesale market to Navi Mumbai.At the Maharashtra State Road Transport Corporation, he turned a loss-making PSU profitable and launched the famed half-hourly ASIAD bus service between Mumbai and Pune in the face of organised taxi-union resistance.In Andhra Pradesh, under Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu, he played a key role in conceptualising Cyberabad, the Visakhapatnam SEZ, the Nagarjuna Sagar water supply system for Hyderabad, the Hyderabad bypass, the biopharma zone, the Hyderabad Metro, the Krishna port and the international airport.As Vice Chairman and Managing Director of MADC, he led the MIHAN multi-modal cargo hub and airport project at Nagpur. As Aurangabad Collector during the 1992 riots, his decisiveness earned him the nickname "Simh."At All India Radio earlier in his career, he was instrumental in bringing FM radio to India in 1977. His biography, Transforming India from Within, was released in 2024.