The growth of the city of Guwahati definitely needs a ring road. The Union Cabinet’s approval on Friday of Rs 5,729 crore for the Guwahati Ring Road Project has thus come as a very timely development. One of the oldest continuously inhabited cities of the country, Guwahati has a history of being pushed to the brink by a set of leaders without any foresight when the capital of Assam was hurriedly shifted—and that too temporarily—to Dispur without any preparation, plan, or programme. Looking back, one finds that the British had in 1874 preferred Shillong over Guwahati for setting up the Assam capital because the latter was full of waterbodies, swamps, and low-lying areas. When the capital was shifted back from Shillong to Guwahati exactly one hundred years later, it simply did not occur to the then government that setting up a state capital was not a child’s play. The result was that Guwahati, whose beauty was so wonderfully described even in the Puranas in ancient times, was destroyed beyond repair. Neither were roads laid in a planned manner, nor were the drains. The premier city of the entire region, which is often touted as India’s gateway to Southeast Asia and Southeast Asia’s gateway to India, does not have a sewerage system even in the third decade of the 21st century. Deprived of a piped water supply by the government, more than half of the city’s population is drinking groundwater with a high percentage of fluoride and arsenic. The absence of solid waste management and the failure to protect the wetlands, hills, and forests have further complicated the city’s condition. While welcoming the decision to provide a ring road to Guwahati, it is also the right of taxpayer citizens to ask the government to make public whether the ring road project also has a drainage component or not.