Bharat Rakshak

wow!.. bbc psy ops or is it a real situation!?!?!?
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^^^^^
i dunno how to fix the link^^

here u go
Skills shortages in India
http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/?rn=289004&cl=5003223&src=finance&ch=1732795

They have a melody news reporter for this segment.

Why We Must Focus On Cities

while cities needs to grow, the villages needs to be strengthened by extra super duper transport and road & rail infrastructure. growth needs to be comprehensive and pura, else cities will fail.. all these growth and cities giving the backbone money, has a threshold value, and beyond that turning point, cities become junk yard, and lose more money than villages.

common sense is not common.. though.

Huuhh..!!!

I understand.. its hard and painful to swallow such things.

In my opinion GOI should plan to identify 100 cities across the country for focussed development. Each should be developed to support 1 crore citizens with world class:

1. Drinking Water and Sewage system
2. Uninterrupted power supply
3. Primary/Secondary Education
4. Primary/Secondary/Specialty Health Care
5. Law and Order (police, courts etc)
6. Roads
7. A coherent public transportation system
8. Intl. standard Airport
9. Housing
10. Parks, sports facilities
11. Environmental support (Green Belts)

I think a well defined plan with a 1200000 ($3B per city) budget over 10-20 years would be able achieve this goal.

Moving half a billion people into already overcrowdy cites is not a good option. If the Goi can bring better infrastructure into the rural areas, the migration might slow down.

All -

Potable water technologies is big business. I am looking into some research on desalination / water purification plants in India. Thought I could ask a general question here...

- What is the going rate for potable water in India by cubic liter?

- Also what is the going rate for electricity in Kw / hr?

- What are the technologies used in India for desalination, how common is it, where is it used, which tech (thermals, RO)?

Thanks!

P.S I have access to the Global Water Intelligence database, but needed some quick datapoints...

It is also hard and painful to swallow garbage.

Whats this rant against cities?? And which village do you live in I wonder.

Threshold value...backbone money...turning point...junk yard..

I repeat WTF.

Rishi, we have discussed this many times before. There is no combination of subsidies that can make a village competitive with a city in productivity.

Every dollar spent trying to keep people in in villages is only going to fritter away our demographic dividend.

Rama,

your ideas are all good except the cost involved. Typically the capital investment required is a function of the productivity of the place.

If we say that a good average salary in these cities is roughly 1 lakh, an investment of roughly 20 times is required in capital.

So for a city of 1 crore - 1 crore x 20 lakh = 2,000,000 crores. Or roughly 400 Billion Dollars for a city of 10 Million (1 Crore).

IMHO this is a very conservative number, but you get some idea of the scales involved.

If you want better salaries, that number is gonna tick upwards quite ferociously.

wtf.. cities suck[both money and infra]!.. why do you call for "my village name" to pick up a fight?

beyond a certain threshold investment, cities just go burst on infra and amenities.. they are the chokers of economy in the longer run, and capital goods remain stuck in the city gullies more than the village ways.

expanded infrastructure is required, and villages should be empowered to take on the cities.. always my whine.. wtf eh!~.

we have lorries of more wastes from cities than villages. an advancing village can take 10 compounding problematic cities.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... 859279.ece

- What is the going rate for potable water in India by cubic liter?

if you mean bottled water that comes in 20ltr plastic bottles...varies from
Rs 45 - Rs 60 in BLR with bisleri at upper end of range. there are many
suppliers at outskirts who clean and reuse the opened bottles and claim
to use all manner of techs to convert the river/bore water into bottled.

Theo,

Its almost always the well-off city folks who are in love with 'the villages' and want them villagers to stay there and live the glorious life of a farmer. While these very folks would happily suffer the misery of the city-life with their family. Treat others the way you would like to be treated is an alien concept to them. If you want good education and opportunities for your kids, which cities offer and villages can’t, so does those villagers.

It is not possible to provide a railway station, medical/eng colleges, a theater, Bank, hospital, shopping center and English medium schools in each village. Village would need to consolidate in to smaller towns and cities (minimum feasible consumer market size) to be able to avail good infrastructure and facilities. The socialist crap of village glorification has been tried with utter failure world over in last 6 decades.

Can you back up your claim?

Buildig roads in rural areas has an enourmus positive impact. The farmers can bring in the produce faster and get better prices, The city dwellers get acess to cheper vegitables. Agri based industries are better suited to be located near the source. The relative distribution cost of vegatbles are among the highest in the world. Imagine that over 35% of the produce simply rot on the way. What is the economic loss here? It must be tens of billions of dollars.
With fast roads, low tech industries can move into rural areas (where the labour is cheaper). Small towns with population below 100 000 will get a massive boost.

Without intigrating the rural economy with the urban economy, Indias overcrowded, dirty, disfunctional cities will become even worse. India will remain poor and backward. It is said that up to 35% of the produce rot before it reaches the consumer.

Rishi,

All you are saying is low productivity, survival first and managing transition (from farming to maufacturing/service) game. Which must be done but the altimate quest should be to get into the real game of moving people out of villages to high productivity (higher pay)maufacturing/service clusters.

I think it is communication gap. When you say City/Urbanization the immediate thought that comes to my mind is all the billion population trying to get into the four or five major cities that we have - Delhi, Banglore, Mumbai etc. What we need to have is small urban centers in each district which offers all of the things mentioned above. Right now Tier II and Tier III cities are too insignificant to attract any of the rural-urban migrating populace. IMO, given Indian population and size of economy the current metro's should go on to become super cities and the Tier II and III cities should come upto the level of the current Metro's.

Not necessarily! We are not building the city from the scratch. The idea is to identify and build the infrastructure around it. For example, I will take Hyderabad, a south Indian city, where I come from. An infusion of the following funds will enable this city to support 1 crore population easily.

1. Drinking Water - 2000 crores
2. Health - 2000 crores (5000 bed capacity)
3. Education - 2000 crores (200000 seats in primary and secondary education)
4. Roads - 2000 crores
5. sewage - 4000 crores
6. Primary response - Police, fire, ambulance - 4000 crores
- 100 centers each with 4 ambulances, 2 fire engines, 10 police cars.
7. Public transportation - 4000 crores
8. Airport - private/public - 1000 crores

hope you get the idea..

There is no way Indian planners can develop >500,000 villages each with the above infrastructure. It will be a colossal waste of resources.

Cities will enable human growth, attract industries, provide quality higher education, etc.. that is the trend every where..

All that is required is an environmentally sound planning. Make the entire city as a watershed by carefully planning the drainage system. that will clean all the river systems and leave them for agricultural purposes.

thanks

I think a lot of people mix up socialistic dogmas like "first feed the entire population, before laying telephone lines" type of arguments.

Devloping rural infrastructure is about pure economic profit, where you can get good return on your investment. I am not taliking about building airports, AC shopping malls etc, but about simple infrastructure like roads, streetlights, police stations, courts etc. Such infrastructure make people invest in small businesses, schools, shops etc. Small scale industry move out of high cost cities and move into these locations.

Imagine if we had international class highways arround Delhi, which made it possible to reach 100 km within 90 min, in a bus. Massive development would take place in the entire region.

I am not saying this should come at the expense of Metors and Airports, but only pointing out that basic infrastructure dvelopment in rural areas is equally important.

India's cities are crowded and filthy not because we did not invest in the villages but because we did not invest in our cities.

No matter what you try 40-50% of our population will fairly soon live in the top 25-30 conglomerations. One per state. And over 80% will live in cities over 1 million.Already for instance Bangalore and Chennai contain roughly 15% of the population of the state. They also produce more wealth than the rest of the their respective states put together. In the next 20 years they are projected to more than double and hold over 30% of their respective states.

This is not a bad thing, just need to prepare for it rather than get very sentimental over our villages.

All this and more exists in the US/Western Europe for instance, it has actually accelerated rural migration. There are whole swaths of the US, the entire western Kansas for instance, where the average age is over 65years and rising.

The population of Hyderabad already exceeds 6 million. The amounts you mention would be down payments on making conditions livable for the existing population!! The new metro alone is expected to cost 6000 crore for one line, when a dozen or so are needed.

For instance that new Airport is projected to be to capacity in 4 years, by 2011.

I repeat you can just cram people in and hope they survive, but the real investment requirements for a livable city are as I enumerated above.

Don't kid yourself, this stuff does not come cheap.



This is how we got into this position remember. It costs vastly more to expand existing infrastructure and it is to build it from scratch. Beyond a certain limit every expansion to a city needs it own brand new infrastructure.

No one is against rural infra the original argument (SaiK) and counter argument (theo) were about moving rural folkes to cities i.e. urbanization of india.

Theo and others: Since this discussion has delved into urbanization, would you mind driving it further in the Urban Development and Public Policy thread, which I created for this specific topic ? It has some background discussion already but has been dormant for a while. There's a lot of ongoing discussion here that fits in there. You can find the thread in this (tech/eco) forum.

Piers have started coming up for the Bangalore Metro's elevated viaduct.

Reach 1 expected to be operational in March 2010
Entire Phase I expected to be operational in Dec 2011



Maybe Singha can take some pics for the Rakshaks and the SSCians?


Work on Delhi metro's 19 km High Speed IGI Airport - ND Railway Station line has begun this week.
Expected to be operational in August 2010

nothing much to report. MG Road is a mess.

HVK the deputy CM is going to retain town and urban planning ministry.
this includes BMRDA,BIAAPA, BDA and BMP.

you can guess the implications of that. the end is nigh, launch the lifeboats.

Rendering on station on MG road.

I seems to bulky and light blocking to me.

Needs to be lighter and airier.

like so.

some people TV interviewed in street asked for "mall shops" and such
at these stations. none of them asked for a giant car park in each station
without which it will be totally useless in reducing commuter cars on road.

I am fully expecting a disgrace like 50 car and 150 bike spaces in each of
these little stations.

in NYC they can get away by having car parks large in the suburban stations
where people travel in morning. in BLR people live all over the place
and there is no such luxury.

source

parking as prescribed by CTTP, Bangalore

There are good Volvo buses plying congested routes, how many take them? They are making losses despite low fares. In other countries people take out cars because they are necessary. Here we do it for show-off and for snob-value.

There would not be enough land for carparks in city stations. Best is to start imposing a environment tax of Rs.500 on every car entering MG Road or other such roads, once metro starts running. Then people will find their own parking space and take train.

This is true when certain levels of reduced migrations are reached. We are far from that level. What we have is discrimination agaist small towns and villages. There is a lot that can be done to chase away people from cities and provide alternatives.

Govt institutions can make a start. If we can have off-shore BPO servicing Aviva and NYLife from Chennai and Coimbatore, why cant SBI, LIC and others move back offices to smaller towns within India? Why should Kaveri Neeravari Nigam and Coffee Board have huge offices in Bangalore with thousands of die-hard parasites wearing out chairs and tables where there is no coffee estate or rivers to worry about? Productivity arguments dont apply to these leeches.

You can produce thousands of such examples in practically every big city in India..

1
The agri part of the economy is rightly a very small part of the economy, but unfourtunatly it is the largest employer and over 50% of the population depends on farming. Even small increases in disposable income in this section of the society, has a huge positive impact on the demand. This demand gives boost to the small town economy.

2
Take the figure of 30 billion dollar loss to the economy every year (I believe it is higher. In a 20 years perspective the total acumalated losses are 600 billion dollars. Hece spending 250 billion within the same timeframe gives an handsome return on capital. In addition comes all the added advantages that good roads bring.

So how much does 250 billion dollars by in terms of roads. If we take a guide price of Rs 10 crores per km, then we get 100 000 km of good highway covering the entire country.

I agree that it should not be an aim by it self to hold back young tallent in rural areas or to waste public money on idealistic fantasy.

But investing in infrastructure in rural areas are neither. The rural areas are backward, mainly becasue of lack of infrastructure.

Again Rishi, this is a political argument, even social one, but NOT a make the economy productive argument.

I would argue the improving the income only seeks to delay and hence destroy their earning potential. This not real productivity.

A small/tiny improvement here requires a massive investment schedule. A $100 Billion here or there is not going to cut it.



Doubtful. Even if you cut the loses in half (not a given) with new roads it is not going to give you a return of even 10%. How is this handsome. Esp. when you consider that within that same time the rural population is continually declining. So you are throwing money at a place people are leaving in droves. How asinine is that.



Not true.

This is what everyone would like to think, but here is what I see from my small holdng.

- Earning power is extremely limited. You only get paid so much for agricultural products and you can only produce so much. Yet the number of mouths increase every year. You can make more cars if you feel like but the agricultural productivity increase is very limited. There is little or no diversification in jobs.

- Good education is very hard to acquire. By its nature labor intensive agirculture is time intensive. You work from Dawn to 9:00 pm plus on most days. There is no time to educate your children or yourself. Despite this laborers these days sacrifice to put their children thru school. The local school near my field is 4 miles away. Little kids 3-4 yrs old walk this every day on the nice new metalled road. Instead a cheap autorickshaw to ferry them would be nice.

Despite what people might think I happen to believe that 90% of education actually comes from your parents. If your parents don't have the time to learn and educate you all you studying is still going to leave you seriously handicapped.

- Here is the truth. Atleast in my area 90 percent of rural folk own no land, no property, no vehicles, are in serious debt, and die by the time they hit 40, leaving no resources for the next generation. In fact all they pass on are debt.

- No fancy schmancy infrastructure is gonna help them. Villages are not idyllic wonderzones. They are hell holes of death. Even Dharavi is a hundred times better. Villages are OK for the small numbers who own houses/land/jobs and ruthlessly exploit the other communities.

- No factories are gonna open there because it costs too much to ship all materials from the suppliers to their out of the way places even on on smooth nice roads. Power is non existent. Skilled labor will not stay. No manager will move out there. There are no competitive advantages.

- Finally, you can build all the fancy infrastructure you want but the earning power does not exist in these places to even maintain what you build. There is no alternative to moving people to cities where they can specialize and become highly skilled.

Questions I have for our esteemed members are

1. Why do you need to move to Delhi, Banglore, Bombay or Hyderabad to be a call center employee of the world? Why can't these services industries move to a village and do the same work? Same for other software based industries (movies, tv, computers, etc All this work can easily be easily done at jhumritallaya than at Bombay. Creating a Call center (or software based industry) at Banglore, Bombay or other big cities is a disservice to India, That city and People in living in thtat city by adding more burden to the infrastructure of that city.

2. For a nation Services Industry gets your butter while Village industry gets you Bread. Which is important Bread or Butter? or Both?

3. Today if village are only producing 700 million worth of food, tomorrow it could sky rocket (when US and/or other major producing countries) stopped exporting it. Bottom line is that FOOD IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN SERVICES. and by ending our independent food factories in village (by buying it from global market), we could be held hostage to the whims of the food producing nations and thus SUBSIDIES GO LONG LONG WAY IN BUILDING A NATION.


4. Only way forward is to have educated farmers with larger land holdings. So that our per capita agricultural productivity is enhanced.

The Billion dollar question is that what will happen to the unskilled unemployed labour?

not an estemeed member, but let me take a shot
i guess quality of life issues. schools, colleges, hospitals, "social eco-system".

but i think small town - aka suburb type of thing might work out as a balance.