By Binu Alex
Can there be a city full of palaces? Yes, and why not? In Udaipur everything is built like a palace, or at least looks like one. From hotels to flats, from small time huts to big time bungalows, everything is designed in such a way that it gives a royal feeling. Even the office of Hindustan Zinc looks like a big palace where you will certainly not find a Maharana Pratap.

Then Udaipur is known for its five water bodies Pichola, Rana Sagar, Fateh Sagar, Swaroop Sagar and Doodh Talai and a number of ghats as well. In 2004, the then PWD minister and present home minister of Rajasthan Gulab Chand Kataria had floated the idea of building a 12-km tunnel to bring water from Sabarmati basin in Gujarat because the lakes went dry for most parts of the year due to recurrent drought.

In addition, no Indian government or civic body has the capacity or the nerves to preserve its water bodies. So Udaipur, ruled by the Sisodia dynasty for 1200 years, is no exception. Perhaps Sisodias could have done a better job then. There are too many hotels but very few of them serve local delicacies. I ordered for a Daal Bhaati and the waiter politely said they don't have it.

I entered another good restaurant and got the same response. So I had to make myself comfortable in a roadside dhaba where they dole out more ghee than the original dish. As we set out to visit one of the biggest open mines in the world at Rampura Agucha, in Bhilwara some 250 km from Udaipur I thought it would take at least five hours. But as I set out, I realized that NHAI has done a marvelous job in setting up good roads across the country and barring a few bottlenecks in some states, the stretches were too good.

Though all were toll roads, it is worth paying that money for the service we get. Large carriers which carried brand new cars from its Gurgaon factory down towards south and large blocks of marble were the main road blockers. But what I have noticed is that as you approach north, traffic rules disappear. Down south and even in west, if you want to travel on your wrong side, you take extreme left of the road.

Here you find vehicles speeding with royal impunity on the right side of their wrong side. In at least three sharp turns, we almost avoided colliding with tractors, jeeps and motor bikes. Is it lack of road safety education or part of the culture? Rajasthan is a rich depository of minerals and marble. No wonder, the Agucha mine is almost a kilometer down and heavy earthmovers looks like cycle-rickshaws from top. The work is on for 24 hours.

The ores are taken out in huge trucks, size of which you realize only when you are closer to it, and carried to a processing unit at the site itself and then taken to the smelters. Mining business is all about cost management and big volumes. If you can't manage a mine properly, then better be out of it. The government realized this in 1999 when it decided to exit this PSU. A government managed staff could not have given such an efficient mine management, a private one can as Vedanta is now showing.

This article appeared in COMMODITY MARKET, India’s No 1 news magazine on commodities.