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By:

Minal Sancheti

2 May 2026 at 12:26:53 pm

Lost in Transport

Mumbai’s grand transport infrastructure is undermined by potholes, Poor discipline and a last-mile gaps that keeps it crawling Mumbai: It is morning time, and Pawan Khandelwal is all set to leave for work. A creative lead at an ad agency in Malad, Mumbai, Khandelwal should take 12 to 15 minutes to reach the office, but that rarely happens because of the traffic, poor road quality and lack of civic sense among co-drivers on the road. He mostly ends up reaching the office in 30 to 40 minutes....

Lost in Transport

Mumbai’s grand transport infrastructure is undermined by potholes, Poor discipline and a last-mile gaps that keeps it crawling Mumbai: It is morning time, and Pawan Khandelwal is all set to leave for work. A creative lead at an ad agency in Malad, Mumbai, Khandelwal should take 12 to 15 minutes to reach the office, but that rarely happens because of the traffic, poor road quality and lack of civic sense among co-drivers on the road. He mostly ends up reaching the office in 30 to 40 minutes. Khandelwal firmly believes that road construction is not a major issue for traffic. “The road under construction is not a big issue because they usually don’t take very long to repair the roads. But even after their work is done, it is not done perfectly. At times when they are digging up the road for other purposes, they often leave a bump or a pothole,” he said. He gives an example, “One can see it on the western express highway. There are so many bumps. We call it a highway, but we can’t even drive at 15 km/h because it is not fixed properly.” He also blames people for not following traffic rules, which adds to the problem. Traffic Woes Although there are coastal roads and metros available, the traffic still seems to be a problem for many residents. A media professional and a daily commuter, Charlene Flanagan has been travelling in Mumbai for many years now. There is not much difference in her experience of the traffic congestion. From her experience, she believes the coastal roads and metros have not completely accomplished the mission of curbing traffic congestion. She says, “As a resident of Mumbai and as a person with a valid driver’s licence, I would say the traf f ic hasn’t really changed. It is still as congested, and whether the coastal roads have helped depends on the time of the day you leave and whether you are going against the traffic or along with the traffic.” The pedestrians also face problems. Saloni Mehta, a theatre artiste, says, “I prefer walking to my destinations. For example, I live in Versova, and if I want to see a play in the Prithvi Theatre, I will take a half-hour walk. However, this one time, I could not reach the venue, not just because of the traffic but also because there were no pavements left to walk on. The roads are dug up, and every road is just half a road.” Mumbai’s average speed covered is 5.2 km per 15 minutes. During the peak traffic hours in the morning, when most people travel to their workplace, the average speed is 18.5 km/h. It is important to understand the issue and address it with a solution. Sudhir Badami, an author of the book ‘Matter of Equitability - Making Commuting in Mumbai Enviable’, explains why people still prefer to use cars over metros, “The metro line 3 has definitely taken away some car users. But it has not taken away sufficient numbers of car users to make a difference in the state of road congestion. The reason behind this is essentially the last-mile connectivity in areas where the Aqua Line or Line 7 operates, especially in suburban areas. In the city area, it is supported by good BEST services on the one hand, and taxis being available near the metro stations on the other hand. But most car users still opt for using their cars, as public transport currently does provide assured exclusivity, comfort and good frequency, not forgetting last mile connectivity. The Coastal Road sees very few cars compared to the number of cars on Mumbai’s Roads. Badami, as a transportation analyst, says, “Mumbai has approximately 16 Lakhs motor cars, out of which only about 55,000 seem to be using coastal roads. It is such a minuscule proportion for whom so much has been spent. This is largely because in the city, people don’t go from one end of the city to the other end. They normally start from in between and go somewhere in between. If there is not much time saving for the shorter stretches, then people are not likely to take it, and there will be continued congestion on city roads.” “In general, the necessity of the last-mile connectivity is an important part, but the greater part will be how to get car users onto the public transport,” says Badami. Public transport must provide near exclusivity, comfort and safety to a car-using commuter for migration to take place. This is where the importance of last-mile connectivity is felt. Air Pollution The slow-moving traffic also adds to the air pollution in the city several times more than when they are moving at optimum speeds, he says. Joint Commissioner of Police (Traffic), Mumbai, Anil Kumbhare, denies that there is much traffic congestion in Mumbai as compared to five years back. He credits the coastal roads for curbing the traffic. He says, “Earlier, there used to be bumper-to bumper traffic near Haji Ali. That has come down drastically. As coastal roads shape, the traffic will go down.” He also adds that there is traffic congestion in the morning hours as people are travelling for work. But there is no traffic jam. Although coastal roads have helped, there are still pockets of the city that face traffic congestion every day. This can be solved with careful planning and execution.

Taming the Unseen

The Physics Nobel for three pioneering Berkeley physicists this year marks a watershed moment for quantum mechanics.

John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis
John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis

Earlier this week, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences presented the field of quantum mechanics with a fitting centennial gift: the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics, which went to physicists John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis for their work done four decades ago at the University of California, Berkeley.


The trio have redefined what quantum physics could mean. Their work showed that the spooky, counterintuitive laws governing the atomic world could be coaxed into appearing at human scales, bridging a divide that had existed since the birth of the discipline itself. It echoed debates and problems chronicled in classic texts such as Max Born’s ‘Atomic Physics’ (English translation pub. 1935) and Werner Heisenberg’s ‘The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory’ (1930).


Quantum mechanics, forged in the intellectual ferment of the 1920s by pioneers such as Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger, has long unsettled even its greatest minds.


In 1926, Albert Einstein famously wrote: “The theory [quantum mechanics] produces a good deal but hardly brings us closer to the secret of the Old One. I am at all events convinced that He [meaning God] does not play dice.” Einstein was responding to Max Born, who had argued that the heart of the new theory beats randomly and uncertainly, as if suffering from arrhythmia. Whereas classical physics promised that push here yields a predictable outcome there, quantum mechanics suggested that even under identical conditions, the same action could produce a range of results, each with a calculable probability and sometimes outcomes that seemed entirely contrary. Einstein’s objection was not to the mathematical formalism itself, which worked brilliantly, but to the probabilistic interpretation that suggested nature at its core was inherently uncertain.


In the quantum realm, particles exist not in fixed positions but as clouds of probability; they can appear to tunnel through barriers they have no right to cross. It is a world in which determinism dissolves, to be replaced by shimmering uncertainty. For decades, this bizarre behaviour was thought to belong exclusively to the infinitesimal (electrons, photons, and atoms) and never to the tangible world of wires and circuits (something that was explored in Richard Feynman’s celebrated lectures on physics in the 1960s).


Clarke, Devoret and Martinis upended that assumption. In the early 1980s, at the University of California, Berkeley, they took inspiration from the tools of low-temperature physics and turned it to a new purpose: showing that the quantum could be engineered.


Working with ultracold superconducting circuits, they demonstrated that vast swarms of electrons could collectively display ‘quantum tunnelling.’ The circuits, visible to the naked eye, behaved like giant quantum particles, a revelation that suggested quantum mechanics was not a special rulebook for the microscopic but a universal language that, under the right conditions, governed everything.


By taming that chaos, the Berkeley trio blurred a boundary that had seemed immovable since the days of Bohr’s Copenhagen debates.


The implications were profound. Their findings virtually birthed ‘quantum electrical engineering’ - a discipline that transformed quantum mechanics from philosophical curiosity into practical craft. Circuits inspired by the trio’s experiments are now used to simulate atoms, detect faint particles, and serve as qubits, the building blocks of quantum computers.


That last application, curiously, went largely unmentioned in this year’s Nobel citation. Yet it is impossible to ignore. Without the pioneering work at Berkeley, the race now underway between Google, IBM, and Chinese labs to build a fault-tolerant quantum computer would have remained a fantasy. John Martinis himself would later lead Google’s quantum supremacy experiment in 2019, when a superconducting circuit performed a calculation no classical supercomputer could manage in a feasible time. The roots of that triumph trace directly back to the trio’s early insight: that quantum effects could be scaled up, controlled and harnessed - an insight foreshadowed in foundational studies like British-American theoretical physicist Anthony Leggett’s seminal ‘Macroscopic Quantum Systems’ (1980).


Leggett’s theoretical framework laid the groundwork for understanding phenomena such as superconducting circuits, which Clarke, Devoret and Martinis would later manipulate in the laboratory to make quantum effects tangible and measurable.


Quantum theory has always been as much a philosophical challenge as a scientific one. Its discovery in the early 20th century forced physicists to abandon the certainties of Newtonian order. The 2025 Nobel Prize celebrates the moment where quantum mechanics, once the physics of the invisible, has finally become the physics of possibility.

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