Comments on: Connecting Bharat!

By: Opinion 2.0 ! - Strat. In

Opinion 2.0 ! - Strat. In — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 12:41:47 +0000

[...] Posted by guest_strater Hello there! If you are new here, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic.Powered by WP Greet BoxThis is written by Shantanu Gangal. Read his first post here) [...]

By: jagdish

jagdish — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 05:09:55 +0000

Living in political and rural environment upto 12th in latur District, maharashtra. i came to know what are the main problems in rural area for the normal infrastructure devlopment.There is not a money problem in most of cases, respective authority get enough money for road construction and maintenance(Maintenance is big business)Problem is that they dont use it. This is the area where there is 90% corruption in rural and state level.In case of national infrastructure the spending occurs directly in mimimum levels. for example NHDP directly gives contract to the respective infra builders . But in rural area for every 5 km road there are different contractors and the authoritis. The tendency of politicians about road fund is like its thier money and they are doing social work by spending some amount out of it.
Then what is solution for it? The money transfor should be in minimun LEVELS.Spending should be through big different private companies( different area for different private sectors as we can judge them according to their work so they will be competent) assigning area wise devlopment and maintenance instead of small political contractors.We can see the example of Reliance Fresh.It works on similar principle but in reverse way.
i will like to conclude by this small(actually big) political funda:
There used to live ( and still living)two friends US politician(UP) and Indian politician(IP). Our IP went to meet UP.Standing near river UP shows IP a river bridge and says ” mine part in it was 20%”. Next year UP came to India.Standing near the river IP tells UP look at BRIDGE. UP says where is bridge?!!!!!!!

By: Hrisheekesh Sabnis

Hrisheekesh Sabnis — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 18:13:44 +0000

Nice work, Shantanu. It was good to see the tightly structured flow of thought (quite expected of a BCG consultant ).

However, I felt that the post ended too quickly just briefly touching on the crucial aspect of clearly identifying and addressing the administrative and financing challenges for that critical intermediate stage. May be, we can use the comment space to elaborate more on this.

My sense is that it will be difficult to attract private capital for development of individual state-level road projects since the current traffic volumes may not be high enough to recover costs within a reasonable time period. Also, the involvement of various government agencies such as the state government and multiple zilla parishads may add to administrative risks.

Finally, a small errata I suppose. You mentioned that “almost 33% of the population resides in the top 8 cities of the country”. I assume meant 33% of the urban population (since only about 30% of the Indian population lives in all the cities combined).

By: AT_korvus

AT_korvus — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 17:37:32 +0000

@Faster trains: not really feasible, considering the tracks and geography of India. And if you are referring to the faster trains mentioned by Mamta Banerjee, then there are a lot of operational issues in that as well (for one thing, they cannot be non stop)

By: Devang

Devang — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 15:30:36 +0000

nice article…
but, i’d suggest you stop offering free consulting anymore.. its your job now

By: Shantanu

Shantanu — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 15:26:46 +0000

Almost 80% of the districts in (India – NE), are within 300 km of a Key Urban Towns mentioned in the E&Y report. Still we have swathes of the area seemingly disconnected.

wrt Railways: People would still prefer faster trains (thankfully we are moving in that direction as well)

By: Umesh

Umesh — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 14:55:15 +0000

Hi Shantanu,Excellent article and well supported by the example of E&Y report!I enjoyed reading the article as it made a lot meaningful by your examples, cheers !!Hope to see more in coming days.
I am hoping that Indian infra story will definetely be a success now specially after PM has become the head on major infra projects.

@strat.in team:Great website to enjoy reading variety of blogs , cheers to you guys as well !!

By: AT_korvus

AT_korvus — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 14:41:15 +0000

Nice article, agree with most of what you have said, especially point 1. It is my belief that we need smaller states to properly tackle this problem. I’ll just cite the case of U.P. The five major cities in U.P. are Lucknow, Kanpur, Varanasi, Allahabad and Gorakhpur (we can also include Agra and Mathura). However, at any given point of time, the focus of the government in Lucknow is on Lucknow itself. This is basically a problem of logistics, and not of bad governance, and it can be easily solved by setting up smaller states. A similar exercise has been carried out quite successfully by the Indian railways when they nearly doubled the number of zones from nine to sixteen.

I would disagree with the third point. The Indian railways daily transports over 20 million people across the length and breadth of the country. For some perspective, this is the total population of Australia. For the majority of India, railway is still the preferred choice of transport, and while bad roads do play a part in this, the fact that travel by railways is heavily subsidized and cheap cannot be ignored.