India's infrastructure

As we had often come back to discussing economic benefits/impact of sports I thought it was about time for an economic discussion forum.
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Atithee
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India's infrastructure

Post by Atithee »

China unveils 'world's fastest train link'

Sigh! When will we come even close to having a world class infrastructure project in India? I think it is a shame that we are still languishing in the dark ages of infrastructure.
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Re: India's infrastructure

Post by Saniapower »

Atithee wrote:China unveils 'world's fastest train links
sigh! When will we come even close to having a world class infrastructure project in India? I think it is a shame that we are still languishing in the dark ages of infrastructure.
China stays miles a head of India in many areas . China can compete with the US now. It's become the world's biggest exporter this year overtaking Germany, next year it will overtake Japan to become world's 2nd largest economy. While India is focussing on giving service China is building its industry based on its world class infrastructure. Meanwhile Indian Railway has no plan for high speed tracks. :damn: Simply they dont have that amount of money.
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Re: India's infrastructure

Post by jayakris »

Hmmm .. We are geting ready to renumber our National Highways .. National highway numbers to change, stretches to be longer

They are looking for a similar scheme as in the US Interstates, but interestingly seems t have decided exactly the opposite numbering scheme though .. The numbers increase from east to west, and north to south .. They will also have opposite convention from the US .. N-S highways wll be even and E-W highways will be odd..

Jay
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Re: India's infrastructure

Post by gbelday »

We need some decent highways first before they start thinking about numbering scheme. I was in Shanghai recently and was completely wowed by that city. We took the highspeed MagLev train from downtown Shanghai to the airport and it took 8 min (1 hr. cab ride). The city felt like Manhattan on steroids :) China is spending enormous amounts on infrastructure and I am sure it will have the same impact that the US interstate system had on US economy (early 50s).
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Re: India's infrastructure

Post by gbelday »

Hyderabad airport ranked up there in the world...
http://business.rediff.com/slide-show/2 ... irport.htm
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Re: India's infrastructure

Post by prasen9 »

gbelday wrote:We need some decent highways first before they start thinking about numbering scheme.
I went from Kolkata to Kharagpur in December on an excellent four-lane highway. However, the car could not be driven faster than 45mph, the posted speed was perhaps 100kmph. Why? Because the driver had to be always anticipating when someone will "cross" the road. We saw cycle-carts, pedestrians, etc. going on the road at will. It is sad that there is no enforcement of some basic traffic laws. Whether WB is worse than the country or not, I do not know. But, it is pointless to make these roads at least in such places if we have cycle-carts taking up a lane and traffic having to deal with such nuisance. And add to that the trucks that insist on driving through the middle of two lanes! There is a bigger problem than one of just building roads.
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Re: India's infrastructure

Post by gbelday »

From today's WSJ...
China, with its sprawling networks of new highways, airports and budding high-speed rail connections, makes for a daunting comparison. India has weaker government finances and an unruly democratic government that lacks China's authoritarian discipline. Clearing land for roads or power plants in China is a cinch; not so in India, where land rights are often hugely contentious. Government-backed companies have led China's infrastructure build-out. India's push will depend heavily on the private sector. And India, with its history of murky and investor-unfriendly rules on infrastructure investment, has a record of disappointment.
India's Infrastructure Drive Must Steer Around Potholes
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... astructure
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India back-office outsourcing to rise 15-16 pct

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http://ph.news.yahoo.com/rtrs/20100609/ ... c71ef.html
India back-office outsourcing to rise 15-16 pct
Reuters, June 9, 2010

BANGALORE, June 9 - India's back-office outsourcing business will post a growth of 15-16 percent in the year to March 2011 on growing demand from overseas clients, the head of a leading industry group said on Wednesday. The export-driven sector has not seen any adverse impact from the European debt crisis, Som Mittal, president of the National Association of Software and Service Companies , told reporters. India's back-office outsourcing sector is estimated to have grown 6 percent to $12.4 billion in the last fiscal year that ended in March. (Reporting by Bharghavi Nagaraju; Editing by Ranjit Gangadharan)
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Nasscom Makes a Beeline to India's Villages

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Nasscom Makes a Beeline to India's Villages
John Ribeiro, PC World
Thu Jun 10, 4:20 am ET
India's National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom) said on Wednesday that its member companies see business opportunities in the country's small towns and villages, where costs are cheaper and staff is more easily available

India's business process outsourcing (BPO) and IT services boom is often criticized as being primarily an urban phenomenon, which has not helped the country's small towns and rural areas develop.

The growth of outsourcing in the cities has instead led to a large-scale migration of rural people into the cities. About 60 percent of the staff working in the BPO industry comes from Indian towns and villages, said Som Mittal, president of Nasscom.
Read more here: http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/2010061 ... villages_1
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BFSI constitutes 50 p.c. of Indian BPO export

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Source: http://www.ciol.com/News/News/News-Repo ... /137503/0/
BFSI constitutes 50 p.c. of Indian BPO export
In the last four years, the BPO industry grew at a CAGR of 23 per cent, while it expects to grow at a CAGR of 25 to 30 per cent in the coming years
CMN Correspondent

BANGALORE, INDIA: The BFSI sector constitutes 50 per cent of India's total BPO service export, said Chirag Buch, CEO, AXA Business Service Private Ltd, while talking on a panel at NASSCOM BPO Strategy Summit 2010 here today.

In the last four years, the BPO industry grew at a CAGR of 23 per cent, while it expects to grow at a CAGR of 25 to 30 per cent in the coming years, he added.

Experts are of the view that the future augurs well for the BPO industry. Donniel Schulman, GM of F&A and SCM practice at IBM, said that when a study was done on 2000 companies around the globe, it turned out that the best performing companies among that bunch had outsourcing or offshoring presence.

But there is an emerging trend happening in the global banking sector which could trigger off a consolidation drive in the BPO industry. A survey done by NelsonHall in February this year indicated that global banks are reducing their BPO vendor count by 14.7 per cent on average. That means the existing service providers will have to strengthen their service portfolios.

Let us wait and see if there will be a consolidation drive in the industry.
©CyberMedia News
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The World's Most Unusual Outsourcing Destination

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The World's Most Unusual Outsourcing Destination
Martyn Williams, PC World
Thu Jun 10, 9:00 pm ET
Think of North Korea, and repression, starvation and military provocation are probably the first things that come to mind. But beyond the geopolitical posturing, North Korea has also been quietly building up its IT industry.

Universities have been graduating computer engineers and scientists for several years, and companies have recently sprung up to pair the local talent with foreign needs, making the country perhaps the world's most unusual place for IT outsourcing.
Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/2010061 ... tination_1
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Re: India's infrastructure

Post by gbelday »

I am pleasantly surprised by all this. But then again, I wasn't aware of the Delhi metro (until it was unveiled). I've been living under a rock lately?

You will soon be riding metro rail in these 12 cities
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Re: India's infrastructure

Post by jayakris »

Oh yeah, there is serious construction of metro rail going on in India. I went up and down the Delhi metro in december for a whole day just for fun (well, it is also related to my academic field) and was very happy with how well things work. No complaints. Saw serious construction in Bengaluru for the metro also - and that one should really make significant changes in some of the city corridors' travel times.

Larger-scale infrastrcuture construction egged on by the private sector constructors is going on fabulously in India. Things are changing quite drastically, in fact. As an example, I was surprised in July when my nephew left by car from Bengaluru to Thiruvananthapuram at around 6 am and reached by 4 pm, covering 700+ km with breakfast and lunch stops in 10 hours. Covering 80-100 km by road per hour was unthinkable in India till recently. He did almost the entire trip through Tamil Nadu to Nagercoil and up to Tvm (mostly on freeway-like facilities) instead of the shorter distance route through Kerala (via Kovaiputtoor/ Palakkad/ Kochi) where he would have had to stay on the old national highways covering 50 km max per hour. I have not been on the TN expressways (built by L&T and GMR, I think) - but my nephew claimed to have driven long stretches at 120-140 km per hour. He even claimed to have done Autobahn speeds of 180 kmph (on a Skoda). Such speeds on Indian expressways was tough for me to believe. Anyway, I gave him a piece of my mind for being that reckless - and he was driving down for his wedding a couple of days later! ...

The problem in India will not be the upgradation of bigger infrastructure. The problem is in the smaller stuff that only government can do. Like painting our givernment buildings and better workmanship with concrete/cement, putting in proper drainage ditches and most importantly the road-shoulder paving, modernizing the water supply infrastructure (which is THE worst problem), upgrading our buses/trains, etc. With the governance system we have in place, these improvements still continue to be at a slower rate than any other place in the world, and we are only falling more and more behind in those things. Again, I am told that some states with better "native discipline" in people and better "native work ethic" (Tamil Nadu and Gujarat, possibly are two of the best?) are doing better on these things despite our archaic governance system... Just on a train ride through areas like Krishnagiri dist in Tamil Nadu, I saw entire villages with nice concrete-paved roads in the middle of huts. That is the kind of thing I look for, as development.

Jay
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Re: India's infrastructure

Post by suresh »

I would be scared to drive at speeds exceeding 100kmph in India because one never knows when

1. a lorry might be motoring on the wrong side of the road;
2. a bunch of cows might be chewing the cud on your lane;
...

I have seen things like this routinely on the "highways" -- one of the worst experiences was driving on the Bangalore-Mysore highway which is, in principle, a good road to do high speeds. The real problem is that these highways are not de-linked from local roads and generically, go through settlements that obviously have a right/might of way :-) In Chennai, there is now a toll-road on parts of the Old Mahabalipuram road that connects Chennai to Mahabalipuram. One would be hard-pressed to tell the difference between the toll-road and the free-road. Initially, I thought that the road work was incomplete and things would get better. However, it is now more than a year since the toll-way opened and there is no change beyond the presence of guys ready to collect your contribution! I hear that the Bombay-Pune highway is fantastic (Sameer/Jaydeep can say more on that) but we all know that Bombay runs to its own beat and has a work ethic/culture that is quite different from any other part of India.

While infrastructure in India is getting better, it is blighted by the Indian weakness of copying form but not function. I expect that this will go away in another 20-30 years.

Suresh
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Re: India's infrastructure

Post by jayakris »

I drove on the Bangalore-Mysore road, which was problematic, because you never know where the police would suddenly place the world's biggest accident danger - the ubiquitous road blocks, which nobody in the modern world would place across a 120 kph road without at least half km warning! ... But building the road is one thing (done by a good big company) - and operating it (done by our Government. My God, run!!!!) are two different things.

I don't find any of the national highways (even stretches of the golden quadrilateral I drove on, like Delhi-Jaipur) really world-standard for what they are supposed to be. Pretty poor, actually. There are some gems here and there not on the NH system though. I thoroughly enjoyed driving along Karnataka state highway (89?) from Madikkeri to Mysore, which was one of the nicest drives I have ever had in India. Felt simply like driving through switzerland, really. The road is absolutely top-notch in every way... Some of the state roads built by foreign firms are pretty good. There are a few built by the malaysian firm Patibel in Kerala, which are really great. The Main Central Road from Chengannur to Thiruvananthapuram (125 km) is a beauty. Same with Ambalappuzha-Changanassery road etc, in Kerala. But the national highways in Kerala are amazingly bad.

There are a lot of changes, but like you said, a lot of things will take at least 20 years to come up near world standards in India.

Jay
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