Should India Follow China or USA in developing Roads and other infrastructure?

[rkumar]

Dear Friends,

Every day there is talk almost everywhere of China's fast developing infrastructure and India lagging far behind. Most of us cursing our government not doing enough on infrastructure front. Most important question is, has there been any meaningful debate on the optimum infrastucture India should develop which can be sustained and should not turn out to be white elephant by the time its ready. Have we or for that matter China has taken into account the availability of all inputs which are required to run all this infrastructure ? In my view no. Both China and India are following blindly the American model. In my view there is strong need of meaningful debate. West would certainly like slower developing China and India as these two nations are putting extreme pressures on resources like oil food and all other metals. Most important question is;

How and what rate we should develop so that we become a strong nation and we do not waste our resurces ? Should our highways and airports should be on the same scale as those of USA and China ? In my view, NOOO. I am basing my arguments on some following basic assumptions;

1. Basic input for today and in foreseable future is going to remain oil. Its going to become more and more expensive as availability decreases. Alternative sources of transport which are non-oil based are going to take long time before scales of production are same as oil based. We Indians must define some sort of road utility index which should not be as generous as in USA or China as wide roads built today are going to go in disuse as oil availability decreases. Building high way takes lots of time and money. My gut feeling is that these 8-12 lane highways are going to be almost hgalf empty in 20-30 years if we go by present rate of oil consuption. India should build wide roads only where we requre them for national defence purpose. All other roads should not be too wide as that takes away lots of land which we badly need for food production.

2. Electricity use needs to be redefined. There many wasteful uses of electricity and can be easily avoided without affecting any of our activity. Some of my suggestions would be;
a. No street lights between midnight and 5 AM.
b. Only single phase supply to tubewells during rainy seasons.

In summary I would say that India should keep putting pressure on all the imported resources from strategic point of view, but should economise on everything inside our territory. Let us consume all arab and african oil and gas first so that west and china don't not get away with cheaper inputs to challenge us on defence front. We should ensure that we use our land very optimally and have enough water for all our activities.

To the members now...

RK^6

[raj2rif]

Dear Rajendra Kumar Ji,

Indeed a very pertinent and current subject to discuss. Here are my views:

The mode of Transportation: I think the best mode of transportation and the cheapest one still remains the railways and we must enhance our already existing rail road system. We need to get out of our dependency on oil as much as we can and as soon as we can. That will help us in two ways:


It will make our foreign policy absolutely free of international pressures.
Make our defense reserve of oil more rich.


Roadway System: We still need to develop our roadways system for it is in a pathetic state to say the least. India is not only Delhi and area around, it is also the remote areas from where our natural resources come. We might not go for 8-12 Lane highways, but we definitely need to have atleast 4 lane highways, free of animals and slow traffic including our Tractors. We could build single lane highways/ roads parallel to the highways for our slower traffic.
Energy Conservation: I think we need to develop our nuclear energy capabilities to boost the fuel requirements of running our railways by electricity rather than on coal or diesel. But more important that this is the distribution system. Rather than cutting down on street lights we need to cut down on the lighting system that exists in most of our villages where no line exists in the house but all rooms have bulbs lighted. These bulbs are put off only when they get fuzed.
I think the rate of growth in our country is adequate at this time and we should try and maintain this. The only problem I am envisaging is that most of it has been due to service industry rather than manufacturing industry and thus is likely to be challenged big time if China starts educating her natives in English Language. We need to base our growth on manufacturing. Again energy would be the key issue. We need to get involved in developing our non conventional sources of energy and sooner we do better it would be for us.
With development come the additional need of defending our installations. National highways as you rightly said should be developed keeping the defense needs in mind. These highways should be big enough for fighter planes to take off and land and should be free of external electric wirings and foliage around. The bridges on these highways should be broad enough and high enough so that the biggest of defense equipment could be transported without any problem. Similar arrangements should exist at our railway system.
Another means of transportation is our water ways. Specially, in areas where we have enough and big rivers, we need to develop the waterway system to compliment our railways and roadways. We also need to develop all these systems parallel to each other with strategic separation so that they are not damaged during the war by single air strike, while it is easy to patrol them during peace.
There is a lot one can write. We can come up with some innovative ideas. Once we have the will to do, it is possible.

[mann123]

Thanks for putting this good topic for discussion Rajendra Jee.

I think this type of topics should be discussed openly and more oftenly.

Here are my views:

1. Infrastructure development is necessary for everything but this should productive and substantial rather than limited to some particular area. Like we should develop some more areas/cities for service sector rather making concentrated efforts for single region, in my case take example of Noida/Gurgaon. Infrastructure needs to be developed in the areas of Rewari/Karnal/Jind/Merut etc. to bring this service industry to these areas, then we can call it a substantial growth otherwise it would create problem for the people of those area which are concentrated and which are not.

2. Foriegn Resource dependency: I am just extending the Tewatia jee's view that we need to extend railways development in terms of rail road or electrification. But it can not happen unless we have some political will like we have some contracts with NSG/US, which doesn't seems to be realistic in current political scenario. In current scenario I feel we must use the resources we have to bulid our country a head of others and alternatively search for other resources. I think China is much more smarter than us as he has acquired almost all the markets of Oil and acquiring more markets of Nuclear fuels.

3. Resource creation: In my opinion the only resource India is having, is largest pool of youngsters. So we need to develop this pool in smarter ways to get some long term objectives and train them as per the needs of future. Government should take some result oriented initiatives to bring this unproductive resource pool and bring them to the route of productive gains.

4. The most important aspect is to control unproductive population and create productive population. Govt. should bring more policies and enforce them to keep the growth rate of productive population healthy and discourage unproductive population. As in my view this is unproductive/less productive population which is taking toll on our infrastructure.

I hope more will added to this topic by our fellow Jatlanders

Thanks

[amanjaat]

sir,
dont worry about the oil getting expensive.
although the source will change.
gulf countries only posess a fraction of oil reserves.
most of it is in russia and oil sands of canada/US, and vast reserves of bitumen from canada are enough to keep the world economy running and fulfilling its ever growing needs.

here in canada we are setting up infrastructure to exploit the reserves of oil sands.
.
.
.
there wont be any dearth of oil in near future. :cool:

[rkumar]

sir,
dont worry about the oil getting expensive.
although the source will change.
gulf countries only posess a fraction of oil reserves.
most of it is in russia and oil sands of canada/US, and vast reserves of bitumen from canada are enough to keep the world economy running and fulfilling its ever growing needs.

here in canada we are setting up infrastructure to exploit the reserves of oil sands.
.
.
.
there wont be any dearth of oil in near future. :cool:

Can India bank upon American or Canadian oil ? Russians are are already using their gas and oil resources as political tools.

RK^2

[ashwal]

I fully agree to the idea of proper utilization of our manpower , especially educated youngsters . Human resource is the biggest asset of our nation and we should take full leverage of it. We may have some dependency or scarcity of resources to create physical infrastructure like roads , power-plants, railway network but using our skilled manpower we can create digital infrasture at a fraction of cost of what has been done in say US and other developed countries. Idea is to "Do more with Same (Physical Physical Infrastructure)".

An e-commerce, e-governance would allow do much more using same physical infrastructure and bring about a lot of efficiency and welfare to people , some of the areas can be

1. We have app. 400,000 IT professional passing out from various institutes every year , as part of their project work , let them create information base about their area , locality , utilities , roads, offices , tourist places , schools , collages organizations making information availability easy and efficient
and reducing physical trip to get even simple information, it can cater to at least urban India app. 35-40 percent of people. This would free up resources for rest as still a lot of resource allocation goes for urban india.

2. We may not require to create/maintain big govt offices , banks , reservation counters if we can create digital interface like for Billing ,Reservation , inquiry, forms download , tax deposit etc.


3. Re-structuring Educational Curricula : In urban areas schools & collages , a good percentage of the educational content/teaching can be made web-based/computer based , leading to less demand on buildings & teachers.


4. Web-based/computer based Proper Land records, information about companies , builders , NBFC can give easy and authentic information to people in general and would reduce a lot of fraud , litigation and conflict.


I agree that PC/Net penetration in India is poor app. 2-3 percent ( Compared to 70 percent in US ) , an alternative can be IT-Kiosk ( like we have STD Booth ) this can be easily achieved by Private partnership.
Also, hardware cost is reducing day by day making PC more affordable..

[amanjaat]

Can India bank upon American or Canadian oil ? Russians are are already using their gas and oil resources as political tools.

RK^2
certainly.
oil reserves of canada are NOT government influenced apart from the royalties they have to be paid.
canadian oil and coal is supplied to consumer companies all over the world.
and as far as i understand, most of the times, its the big corporations and their money that influences the foreign policy of a nation (eg the war for oil in iraq waged exclusively for H-burton).
so yeah, if corporations of india are strong enough they might even lease some oil-fields of canada itself.