Does good delivery of infrastructure translate into votes? History answers in the negative, at least as far as transportation infrastructure goes.
1999: After building the hugely successful greenfield Mumbai - Pune Expressway, the Shiv Sena + BJP combine lost Maharashtra.
2004: Here we find how the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana - PMGSY - and the National Highway Development Program - NHDP (remember Golden Quadrilateral) - which took off, touted as Vajpayee's brainchild, didn't yield political dividends for the then NDA Government. Neither did Delhi Metro which began operations in 2002 and was globally appreciated.
2017: The parallel to be drawn here is that despite commissioning the massive Agra - Lucknow Expressway in a record time of 23 months, arguably the fastest for such a length - 302 km, and having almost opened the first phase of Lucknow Metro at a brisk pace, we saw how the Samajwadi Party (SP) meet the same fate in UP. The Moradabad - Bareilly National Highway project too saw operations starting during SP's tenure (central government projects do not finish without the state government's assistance). Banking on all these, while I did feel SP's #KaamBoltaHai election slogan was a bit arrogant, it can't be denied there were good reasons why it was adopted in the first place.
This makes me wonder that Governments that do well on the infrastructure front often face a backlash from the masses instead of being entrusted with governance again.
Perhaps the people, the voters, don't really know what they want.
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