The promise of freight corridors

The much-delayed project to build the ambitious eastern and western dedicated freight corridors has received a boost with the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs approving a revised cost estimate for it. At Rs.81,459 crore, the figure is more than double the originally estimated Rs.28,181 crore. The 1,839-km-long eastern corridor will connect Ludhiana in Punjab with Dankuni in West Bengal. It will have two components, a double-track section and a single-track segment, both electrified. It will cut across six States. The eastern corridor will cater to traffic streams including coal, finished steel, cement and fertilizer. The western corridor will cover nearly 1,500 km, connecting the Jawaharlal Nehru Port near Mumbai with Dadri, and passing through States such as Haryana, Rajasthan, Gujarat and Maharashtra. A substantial portion of the revised cost will be met by way of debt from multilateral institutions such as the Japan International Cooperation Agency and the World Bank. The equity requirement of the Railways will be around Rs.23,796 crore. Dedicated Freight Corridor Corporation of India Ltd., the special purpose vehicle set up by the Railways to implement the project, is keen to complete it by 2017-18. Once the twin-corridor system is in place, it will transform the very profile of the Railways. A host of positive outcomes, such as reduction in transportation costs and stepped-up commercial activity, benefiting a range of core industries, could flow from it. This could in turn have a multiplier effect on the economy.

Poor infrastructure has been a principal worry for Indian industry. More often than not, this has affected its ability to be efficient providers of goods and services. End-consumers have been forced to pay for the collective inefficiency. The twin-corridor project was conceived in 2005 and was approvedby the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government in 2008. The huge cost overruns owing to the time lapse tell their own tale, and reflect the massive challenge facing policy-planners in pushing through a project of this size and magnitude that has inter-State implications. From a slow decision-making process to roadblocks to land acquisition, there are problems aplenty in the way ahead for the project. No doubt, land acquisition is turning out to be a touchy political issue. Prevarication on the decision-making front will hurt the viability of even soundly conceived projects. The Narendra Modi-led government would do well to ensure that the twin-corridor project goes through without any further delay. The key to doing so will lie also in taking along the States concerned.

Needed, a new urban vision

Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched his flagship Smart Cities Missionproclaiming that governmental intervention in planning the cities would be minimal. He referred to a “bottom-up approach”, but did not emphasise who exactly would benefit from the cities. The approach suggests that India is breaking away from its Anglo-European architectural tradition, promoted by Jawaharlal Nehru in the 1960s with the projection of Chandigarh as a template for urban planners. Nehru’s aim was to create mixed-income cities with easy access to community infrastructure and to institutions such as the judiciary, the legislature and the executive. But Mr. Modi’s urban-planning approach contradicts that view and largely resonates with American-style urbanism. The government is putting the spotlight on smart cities and allowing the business community to lead the development. Let us take an example in the U.S. to figure out who could benefit from the new urban plans in India. In New York City, most of the commercial and residential buildings from uptown to downtown Manhattan are inhabited by the rich who can afford the huge rents. They have installed biometric security systems to keep the ‘unwanted people’ — that is, the poor — at bay. The city government has largely outsourced the public services to private companies, which are replacing the labour force with mechanised technology. As a result, the job market has become saturated. The unskilled workforce is caught up in a low-wage job cycle.

Before pushing India on to a similar American path, Prime Minister Modi must step back and re-think whether his government should invest in smart cities, or rather empower the existing urban centres by means of policies that cater to poor and middle class Indians. For instance, at present almost every Indian city faces sanitation issues due to the absence or inadequacy of drainage networks. The migration of people from rural areas to the urban peripheries continues at a rapid pace, resulting in the mushrooming of slums and unauthorised colonies. According to Census 2011, some 65 million people live in slums. The government’s response to the issue in terms of planning to build affordable housing for them is short-sighted. Smart cities would simply institutionalise the disparity within the cities instead of filling the lacunae. The last decade of urbanisation did change the academic and policy consensus toward urban centres, but ignored the fringes of these centres where those from the poor and the lower-middle class who came in a large influx ended up. In Delhi, the government passed on powers to residents’ welfare associations, which now decide on the choice of basic civic matters — and they always give preference to their own gated communities. Mr. Modi must take a forward-looking stance when it comes to developing urban India. Otherwise, the glossy vision of building smart cities could end up triggering a process of social apartheid.

India - The new global favourite?

India's performance in attracting foreign investment is in the news. Last week, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development or Unctad released new data that placed India as the ninth largest recipient of foreign direct investment(FDI) in 2014. This was a significant improvement over 2013 when India was ranked as the fifteenth largest recipient of FDI.

In the space of one year, India has raced ahead of about half a dozen countries in attracting more FDI than them. The countries that India has left behind include France, Russia, Spain and Mexico. And the countries that are ahead of India in this list are China, Hong Kong, the United States, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Brazil, Canada and Australia. To be in this league should be no mean achievement.

That is not all. There are now reports that India is ranked number one in a new index that judges international investment destinations for their attractiveness to foreign investors. Daniel Altman's Baseline Profitability Index shows that India, at the top of this league, is ahead of China by several notches. Believe it or not, China's rank is 65, compared to 50 for the United States. The logic of the new index is that foreign investors evaluate the potential for increase in the value of their investment and growth. Based on these and some other parameters like corruption and the freedom to repatriate profits, the index shows that India is ahead of the rest.

Whatever may be the credibility or acceptability of such an assessment, both the Unctad listing and the new profitability index bring into sharp focus India's performance on the foreign investment front in the last few years. What do the composition and the source of such foreign investment indicate? Is it an outcome of the new government's investment-friendly policies? Or has the foreign investors' perception of India as an investment destination changed?

Foreign investment data for the last fifteen years show that India's foreign investment flows have seen an interesting trend in this period. They doubled in five years - rising from $4 billion in 2000-01 to $8.9 billion in 2005-06. The rise in the next ten years was even more striking. In 2006-07, foreign investment flows saw the most dramatic spurt as they went up to $22.8 billion and almost doubled in two years to $42 billion in 2008-09.

The global financial downturn made its impact on India's foreign investment flows as they declined to $38 billion and $35 billion in the subsequent two years. But the significant point is that there was no major setback to India's foreign direct investment flows in the following years. Indeed, India continued to attract more foreign direct investments at $47 billion in 2011-12. The years of 2012-13 and 2013-14 saw a dip in these flows to $34 billion and $36 billion, respectively. But last year (2014-15), India's foreign direct investment flows went up again to $45 billion.

But a closer look at these impressive numbers reveals three interesting trends. One, reinvested earnings by foreign investors in their entities in India have accounted for 25-30 per cent of the total foreign direct investment flows. In other words, these investments have not necessarily flown to or resulted in greenfield ventures. Instead, they are largely reinvestments to expand existing capacity. But the impact such reinvested earnings have on the economy as a whole is certainly different when compared to what fresh investments in a new project would have.

This is also a reflection of how setting up new ventures in the country has been problematic compared to expanding existing units. Apart from procedural problems in setting up new ventures, the hurdles created by the new land acquisition and rehabilitation law must have had an impact on the foreign investors' sentiment towards India. Why court trouble and delay if reinvesting your earnings in existing projects to expand capacity is faster and less problematic, they must have argued. And the data may just be bearing that out.

The second interesting trend is that a significant chunk of the total foreign investments has gone to the services sector, which includes banks, insurance ventures and outsourcing units. In the last 15 years, as much as 17 per cent of total foreign equity flows have gone towards the services sector. Policy makers could analyse why the manufacturing sector, whose revival is critical for growth, has so far attracted relatively low foreign investments. Why, for instance, the power sector should get only four per cent of total foreign equity inflows or the automobile sector's share should be only five per cent?

And finally, even though total foreign investments have been rising, India still figures quite low at 89 in the global ranking of countries with foreign investment measured as per cent of their gross domestic product.

Educational re-alignments

Of all the issues on the policy table, education is perhaps the domain allowing the smallest margin of error. Decisions taken today will have consequences that persist for decades and cannot be reversed. Universal and high-quality primary education will provide the foundations for all the initiatives related to production, productivity and employment to achieve success. Its absence will undermine the effectiveness of all these. On this score, the country's record is not great. While almost universal enrolment in primary school is certainly an achievement, it appears to be coming with a significant trade-off in quality. Most importantly, there is a significant drop-off in enrolment in secondary school, suggesting, among other things, inadequate preparation at the primary stage. The last thing the country needs in a globalising and technologically advancing international business environment is a poorly educated workforce.

My colleague Rohan Sandhu and I just co-edited a volume, Accelerating Access to Quality Education*. This brings together, besides an editorial introduction, 16 contributions from a variety of stakeholders in primary education. It also has six "last mile" perspectives: reflections on priorities and challenges from school leaders, teachers and education innovators. It provides a rich mix of insights and action recommendations to address the core objectives of any education policy, which are captured in the title of the volume. The framework bringing these three objectives together aligns closely with the themes that the Ministry of Human Resource Development is focusing on as it builds up to a new education policy.

I cannot capture the range and richness of the recommendations in this column; instead, I want to try and synthesise the perspectives in terms of alignment between the objectives themselves and the roles and responsibilities of different stakeholders.

At the first level, clearly, the trade-off between access and quality is a high price to pay. Lowering standards just to increase numbers may seem like a price worth paying in the short term, but, as I argued earlier, the consequences of inferior quality will beset people for a lifetime. The policy objective must be to ensure that expansion of access is accompanied by a host of measures to improve quality and sustain it. And looking at the challenges posed by numbers, there isn't any time to lose. Rapid expansion of capacity can only be done by experimenting with all kinds of delivery mechanisms. Many of these are already being tried in various situations, but typically at a small scale; how to scale or replicate successful models must be a central question in the policy debate.

In achieving these objectives, four broad stakeholder groups need to find alignment around the pivotal stakeholders, the students. These are teachers, parents, the community and the government. A number of perspectives on this critical group are presented in the volume and were discussed at a launch event organised last week. School leaders worry about their ability to motivate teachers to adapt new methods of delivering content and stimulating creativity in a very rigid contractual structure. Teachers find themselves being pulled between conflicting demands from basic teaching and increasing administrative loads from compliance requirements of various programmes. A no-detention policy, while it may have merits, increases the dispersion of capabilities in each class, making it difficult to pay attention to lagging students or mentor promising ones.

There appears to be a compelling case for re-designing leader and teacher training programmes. The basic B Ed syllabus seems not to have been changed for many years, even as there have been so much movement in content, pedagogy and technology. Leaders and teachers equipped with the foundations to deal with this movement are a necessary condition for the alignment between access and quality.

Parents are, obviously, an essential stakeholder group, but are they playing their role as wholly as they need to? The dominant view is that there is inadequate communication between teachers and parents on issues that really matter. There is, of course, a temptation to de-prioritise this particular channel of communication. The majority of students may be first-generation school-goers. Parents essentially see schools as custodians, not to be questioned, whatever they may do. And so on. But if the inadequate participation of parents in the process contributes to a deterioration in quality, ways must be found for more productive engagement. There are promising innovations that can template the interaction between teachers and parents independent of socio-economic conditions. These need to be encouraged in order to allow this critical stakeholder group to play its role to the fullest.

The role of the larger community cannot be questioned, but we need to move from generalities to specifics. A wide range of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have been active in exploring alternative delivery mechanisms, many of which show promise on quality criteria. Whether these models can be used to expand access is a question that needs to be answered quickly. Systematically documenting and disseminating experiences, successful and failed, should be a priority for this network. Significantly, NGOs may play a productive role in partnering with public school systems in implementing new methods of both teaching and assessment. Holding public systems to account on the basis of transparent criteria is an important role for the communities that these systems serve.

Finally, there is the role of the government, which could fill a volume by itself. But let me highlight three important considerations in the context of this framework. First, it must create the space to encourage every promising model of delivery to scale up, subject to some clearly defined quality criteria being met. This means both more efficient utilisation of current capacity and legitimising innovative new models. There are outstanding examples of both cost-reducing and pedagogical innovations, which could greatly accelerate access wit quality. These must figure prominently in the choices the central and state governments will make.

Second, it must institutionalise assessment methods that test capabilities across an entire range, which is the irreversible trend globally. Third, many of the changes that are being suggested in relation to the roles and responsibilities of the other stakeholders require government to act, whether it is teacher training or more effective parental involvement. It is necessary to provide broad guidelines, but the temptation to over-engineer the processes must be resisted. Government cannot and should not be a dominant or overbearing partner in this process.

India ranks 143rd on global peace index; Iceland tops list

India ranks 143rd on global peace index; Iceland tops list
Iceland, Denmark and Austria are ranked top three on the index

India ranks a lowly 143rd on a global peace index, lagging way behind the likes of Bhutan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh with Iceland emerging as the most peaceful nation in the world.

According to the nonprofit Institute for Economics and Peace, Iceland, the thinly populated island in the midst of the North Atlantic has retained its place as the most peaceful country in the world. The institute released its Global Peace Index for 2015 recently, which ranks 162 nations around the globe based on factors like the level of violent crime, involvement in conflicts and the degree of militarisation. The nations are given a score on that basis. The more the score, the less peaceful the country is.

India is ranked at 143 on the index with a score of 2.504. The number of casualties from internal conflict also rose in India where a Maoist insurgency stills runs rife. The downgrade in India's score is tempered, however, by an improvement in political stability. The world's second most populous country witnessed an historic election in 2014 as the Bharatiya Janata Party secured India's first one-party majority since the mid-1980s," the report said. Six out of the top 10 most peaceful countries were European, with Denmark and Austria holding the second and third spots.

"Europe maintained its position as the most peaceful region in the world, supported by a lack of domestic and external conflicts," the report said. Pakistan fares badly, ranked at 154, with its score deteriorating on the back of a worsening of its perceptions of criminality, as a result, the country remains second from the bottom in South Asia.

"The country's dire domestic security situation continues to be hampered by the presence of Islamist militant groups. Even though the number of deaths from internal conflict did not worsen significantly over the past twelve months, Pakistan suffered a handful of high-profile incidents -- most notably the separate attacks on Jinnah International Airport and an army-run school in Peshawar," the report said.

Afghanistan remains the most lowly ranked in South Asia at 160.

Bhutan (18), Nepal (62), Bangladesh (84) and Sri Lanka (114) are all ranked above India, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

US is also ranked at a lowly 94 scoring badly in terms of militarisation, homicides and fear of violence. China is ranked 124.

Syria and Iraq where the Islamic State terror group has taken over large swathes of land are at the bottom of the table as the least peaceful countries.

No more using fresh water? Panel on Yamuna restoration suggests ban

A slew of measures have been suggested for maintaining the natural "ecological" flow of Yamuna while it passes through the capital.

A committee constituted by the National Green Tribunal has suggested that use of fresh water should be prohibited and made an offence in order to maintain the minimum environmental flow of Yamuna river.

The principal committee, headed by Shashi Shekhar, the Secretary in the Ministry of Water Resources, was constituted by the green panel on January 13 for implementing the Maili se Nirmal Yamuna Revitalization Plan, 2017.

The tribunal had directed the committee and the Chief Secretaries of all the states through which the river passes, to submit their suggestions on the issue of minimum environmental flow.

The principal committee has suggested a slew of measures to be adopted for maintaining the natural “ecological” flow of Yamuna while it passes through the capital.

The committee has recommended that in all the urban towns situated along the river, the sewage water must be mandatorily treated and supplied for industrial processes, railway and bus cleaning, fire-fighting, city parks, construction activities etc.

“For such purposes use of fresh water should be prohibited and made an offence. This will save significant amount of fresh water which is today diverted from the river and to the extent that such fresh water is saved, e-flow in the river should be further augmented from Hathnikund Barrage, the committee said.

It also advocated setting up of common effluent treatment plant with zero liquid discharge arrangement in industrial clusters located near the banks of the Yamuna.

“These industries, therefore, should be banned from drawing fresh water from the ground water or supply by the municipalities. This will again save huge quantum of fresh water and to that extent additional e-flow from Hathnikund Barrage should be released in the river Yamuna.

“Agricultural practices shall be mandatorily made water efficient in terms of cropping and water use. Use of fresh water from rivers for irrigation purposes shall be discouraged and the use of treated sewage from the urban centres shall be encouraged and rewarded. Current practice of indiscriminate extraction of the ground water to meet cash crop agricultural needs shall also be curtailed by law,” it said.

Rainwater could help Indians save money: NASA data

Rainwater could help Indians save money: NASA data

Rainwater harvesting is not a new concept, but researchers said it is a largely untapped technique in India.

Collecting rainwater for vegetable irrigation could reduce water bills, increase caloric intake and even provide a second source of income for people in India, according to a new study by scientists looking at NASA satellite data.

The study is based on precipitation data from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), a joint mission between NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, which provided observations of rainfall over the tropics and subtropics from 1997 to 2015.

“India has severe problems getting potable water to all of its residents,” said Dan Stout, research assistant in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Utah.

“We considered collecting water in a relatively small tank, and it’s amazing the effect that doing something that small and simple can have on the Indian people,” Stout said.

Rainwater harvesting is not a new concept, but researchers said it is a largely untapped resource in India.

In the new study, the team examined the possibilities if Indians collected precipitation in cheap 200-gallon tanks that they could easily engineer to fit in densely populated urban areas, such as many of India’s growing cities.

The team analysed satellite data of precipitation in different areas to evaluate the availability of rainwater for direct harvesting.

The team used data sets provided every three hours from 1997 to 2011 to determine how much precipitation, on average, was available for collection and supplementation in each of the six test cities: Bangalore, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai and Srinagar.

The team input TRMM data into algorithms that Stout developed to determine the benefit to each of two scenarios: indoor use and outdoor vegetable irrigation.

They estimated each person would require an average of about 35 gallons of water per day. For an average household of five people, demand would be about 178 gallons daily.

Outdoor vegetable irrigation would require less water.

The team calculated irrigation demands for a roughly 215-square-foot garden planted with tomatoes and lettuce.

The team found rainwater harvesting provided for nearly 20 per cent of the average indoor demand overall, though some seasons, such as southern monsoon season, provided more.

Rainwater harvesting provided sufficient water source for vegetable irrigation, which demands less water than indoor use.

While rainwater collection for irrigation resulted in fewer water bill savings, it did provide vitamin—rich food, profit from selling excess vegetables and a significantly shorter payback period for infrastructure, operation and maintenance required for the endeavour.

This can help boost cost savings and increase quality of life in India, researchers said in the study published in the Urban Water Journal.

After a one-year payback period, rainwater harvesting for vegetable irrigation would provide a profit of between 1,548 and 3,261 rupees per year and a total cost savings of between 2,605 and 4,522 rupees per year.