India, April 19 -- The Rs 12,000-crore, six-lane corridor is the kind of project that looks clean and inevitable in a press release. What it actually represents is harder to articulate and far more interesting.

On April 14, Prime Minister Modi inaugurated the Delhi-Dehradun Expressway near Akshardham, cutting that journey to two and a half hours. When I first read that, I saw it in a number. Two and a half hours. It felt almost as wondrous as time travel. The Rs 12,000-crore, six-lane corridor is the kind of project that looks clean and inevitable in a press release. What it actually represents is harder to articulate and far more interesting. Because this isn't really a story about one road. It's the story of a state and especially its ...