No need for speed: Why Kerala’s new highways will exact a heavy price

Kerala’s new National Highways are being built in the name of development and progress. They promise to shorten travel time, quicken the flow of goods, and let sleek cars glide from one end of the state to the other. Yet, I find myself uneasy.

For in this narrow land – barely 120 kilometres from mountains to sea – where people live in a seamless “rurban” landscape, where rural and urban space flow into one another without visible borders, such speed comes at a high social and ecological cost.

More than a century ago, English academic Thomas F Taylor warned of “the fallacy of speed”, Writing in 1909, he argued that the pursuit of ever-greater velocity in movement and production would unravel the moral and social fabric of society. Speed, he said, does not merely shorten distances; it distorts relationships. It pulls people and wealth toward a few centres and leaves others depleted.

Mohandas Gandhi, reading Taylor that same year, drew the lesson into his Hind Swaraj. He saw in the railway and the motorcar the very symbols of a civilisation intoxicated by haste – machines that made us believe we were advancing while eroding community and self-reliance. For Gandhi, the question was never how fast we could move,...

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