PPPs AND THE RURAL EDUCATION SECTOR

I had discussed this in one of my journal entries but I thought this could be discussed amongst the other classmates as well.Kindly post your comments on the same, especially on the issue of attracting private players in the rural sector.

Education ,I believe is one among the decisive factors that determine the technological progress of a nation. Eventhough there are other priorities at the rural sector, education ,I believe is a fundamental right and is something that no one should be denied. Not very surprisingly, in the rural scenario, the scene is very bad.Be it, roads, building infrastructure, electricity, water supply , the rural education sector requires a certain upliftment from its current status.

The primary facility requirement for a school or an education centre is a building to house the numerous children. Be it, classrooms, office rooms, or other complexes, building infrastructure forms the backbone of the education sector in general. A recent survey tells us that 62% primary schools in Assam, 34% in Andhra Pradesh and 30% in Meghalaya have just one classroom. Most of the schools at the rural sector, today lack such basic facilities. In many cases, schools are made out of thatched roof or temporary structures which wait for a small drizzle or a light wind to collapse down.

Most of the families are reluctant to send their children to the nearby schools because they are far away and it’s both difficult and costly, to ply to and fro. Thus transportation infrastructure, primarily roads find its need here.

According to data available from the MoP, in India, out of an estimated 587,556 villages about 150,000 are yet to be electrified. A general issue with schools in the rural sector is the lack of power supply.Electricity and power are essential right from performing routine activities to running machines and equipments. Its absence would therefore mean inefficiency and zero productivity.An interesting survey shows that among teachers who were paid to teach, absence rates ranged from 15% in Maharashtra to 71% in Bihar.

Lack of teaching staff in most of the rural areas is a major problem. A solution that lies ahead to this can be achieved through the telecom sector. With modern teleconferencing and internet facilities a rural area could be taught through online or virtual teaching methods. Similarly, computer literature, and setting up of internet facilities or telephone connections becomes inevitable for technological development, and all of these depend on the telecom infrastructure.

Health, sanitation and water supply also form a basic requisite for an educational institute. A study of 188 government-run primary schools found that 59% of the schools had no drinking water and 89% had no toilets.With the lack of all these, rural schools, are in many cases worse than a poultry farm.

Definitely what the government must do is to strategically include Private participation in this sector. As from the cases we have seen and with our knowledge on a PPP project , we know that with their involvement comes efficiency and faster project completion rates . Now as it is obvious, the private sector has not shown interest because they see very low returns here. Incentivizing them is the actual question.

Here what I propose is to include a rural education project also as a bidding criterion in huge urban infrastructure projects. Thus ,the bidders will have to take up these projects and complete them on time so as to continue with their urban initiatives .Also to incentivize them the revenues obtained from the rural projects could be tax exempted

.Be it, Roads, buildings, health and sanitation systems, telecommunication facilities, definitely, with our relatively lower rate of progress from the government’s initiatives, I believe that Private penetration is required so as to uplift the case of the rural education sector and until then, an educated Rural India shall stay, an unfulfilled dream.

Crazy infrastructure proposals - Floating cities

This time Japan has certainly stretched their imagination bordering on science fiction. They have come up with this crazy idea where people will be living on gigantic cities in the ocean. And not just cities, whole districts and even countries can be formed.

The concept is known as green float & they even want to try for zero waste & negative carbon emissions by incorporating all sorts of "green technologies" such as complete recycling of all waste and building enormous artificial ecosystems.

While right now no one has any plan or the money and all this is still science fiction, I feel that if people do some serious research on these concepts, they may actually come up with solutions that are also very relevant to current issues. Work on such concepts can result in spin-offs that can be of great use for tackling many current infrastructure problems like waste recycling, water treatment & desalination, zero emission policy, "green & sustainable development", use of alternative energy (like solar, etc..), vertical farming, transport systems, lower maintenance systems, and many more.

There are other crazy ideas like Tokyo Pyramid, which also try to tackle the issue of space in future living and other proposals. This Japanese firm is known for coming up with really ambitious proposals. Whether we can actually invest in such schemes is very questionable, but some of their technological proposals are certainly worth putting some research into as they can be pertinent to improvement of current infrastructure.

This is from a newspaper article : -

"...Green Float: The futuristic concept that sees humans live in giant skyscrapers on floating water lilies in the middle of the Pacific.

Humans in the future could live in mini floating cities that drift across the Pacific as if on giant water lilies.

The startling new concept has been dreamed up by Japanese technology firm Shimizu and is designed to be a way of harnessing green technologies and creating carbon-neutral cities.

The Green Float concept involves a number of cells, each one kilometre wide, that house between 10,000 and 50,000 people.

The majority of people on the cells would live in huge towers 1km high surrounded by lush green fields

Each individual cell would be free to float on the Pacific Ocean near the equator but could also be joined together with other cells to form larger towns and even cities.

A group or modules, a collection of cells, would become a country in its own right.

Most people in this brave new world would live in a 1 kilometre-high ‘City in the Sky’ at the centre of each cell. More people would live in residential areas around the edge of the cell.

The central towers would be surrounded by grassland and forests and be self-sufficient in terms of food, while livestock and other farming would take place in 'plains' also surrounding the tower - all built on a lattice of 7,000-tonne honeycomb pontoons.

The towers would be built from super-light alloys with the metal deriving from magnesium in seawater.

The imaginative plan is designed to create a future carbon-neutral society and the Shimizu developers claim that living on cells in this way would cut carbon emissions by 40 per cent.

The floating cells, each with a City in the Sky structure at its centre, can join together to form larger modules

The City in the Sky skscrapers are designed to be carbon negative with extensive environmental technologies and recycling facilities built in

The cells would create zero waste and recycle every product and covert waste into energy using new green technologies. Islands of waste would drift around the ocean and could be ‘harvested’ to provide energy

The location of the islands is key to their success too, the designers claim.

Each group of cells would be near the equator where the climate is at its most stable and a range of technologies would be used to protect the floating cities from tidal waves and extreme weather.

To protect the inhabitants from large waves, strong elastic membranes would be attached to the lagoons around the outer edge of the cells, with the shallows above the membranes standing 30 feet above sea level.

Shimizu scientists calculate that the water pressure difference between the lagoons and the ocean would limit the movement of the membranes and buffer the force of the open sea waves.

Seawalls as high as 100 feet could also be constructed. And tsunamis in the open sea are far less dangerous than those that hit coastal areas, the designers say.

Enlarge

A country consisting of one million people would be formed after modules joined together one by one

Lightning rods would be fitted around the circumference of the towers and mesh lightning conductors will be placed on the exterior walls to protect against lightning strikes.

Shimizu wants to develop the first cells by 2025 and is concentrating on developing the technologies to make it happen. The concept was displayed at a recent Japanese university conference.

This is the not the first outlandish idea that Shimizu has come up with. The firm also proposes encircling the moon in a belt of solar collectors that would collect solar energy and transmit it to Earth....."

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1328680/Green-Float-The-bizarre-new-concept-sees-humans-future-live-giant-skyscrapers-floating-water-lilies.html#ixzz157rg9DN6

There is also a video on that link.

Investing in Solar Power for India

India's tropical location makes it naturally favoured to make use of huge amounts of solar energy. Right now there is a 35000 sq. km area in the Thar Desert that is allocated for any proposed large solar projects, and the estimate is that they could harness anywhere upto 700 to 2100 GW depending on efficiency.

Note : As a reference for comparison, the installed power generation capacity as of now 162 GW (June 2010) and the demand is likely to cross 1 GW in the next 20-30 years. We can in theory extract more energy than we'll ever need for the next several decades. As a statistic the total energy available is so great that even with 10% efficiency of harnessing, we still have more than 1000x the energy demand in 2015 (Wiki Reference)

The problem here though is the cost of investment. Right now this would require huge areas of land and the problems of land acquisition and the associated cost is very prohibitive. A better way of using the available space is to go 3-D and try for rooftop systems. However to make this feasible requires the technology to become substantially cheaper.

Right now the cost of production ranges from 15 to 30 per unit compared to around 5 to 8 per unit for conventional thermal energy. (Aside : For thermal energy, that's far more than our EB bill rates even with the revised tariff -- profitability vs affordability issues.)

Even the best solar cells are only about 25% efficient which is close to the theoretical limit, and that's as good as we can go. However they are very robust and can last for 30 yrs + at maximum capacity.

At present the renewable energy scenario stands at just 16 GW most of which is due to wind energy.

The Govt. has taken up a major initiative in this regard with the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission, which though is still in planning phase. You can check this out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jawaharlal_Nehru_National_Solar_Mission

If we could sustainably get into solar power production then over several years our import bill (most of it on oil) can also be drastically reduced.

We have to accept that with the limits on coal and petroleum reserves, solar energy is the future. But still there is a lot of ground that needs to be covered.

References : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_India

To Lead By Example!

India, on the verge of a double digit GDP growth needs to capitalize on the Obama factor if it has to meet its needs in almost all sectors. A rather overly regulated economy preventing FDI in the infra sector was communicated by the U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, calling for further policy shifts. But the U.S no longer seems to be the driving force in the South Asian economies and now, more than ever, they seem reliant on these economies towards providing jobs / opportunities for the Americans themselves. There is probably no better opportunity than this for India to capitalize upon. But, like all bureaucratic initiatives, time seems a defining factor which brings us back to the need of direction. This direction stems from the need of strong leadership.

On whether Manmohan Singh paints a picture of sound leadership, is a very debatable topic in itself, however, the lack of leadership in the state of Maharashtra is something unheard of. In a people-rich country, presence of leaders, or better said as, presence of politicians with a majority behind them, seems lacking. How can a multi-crore project function sans leadership? Well, at least there will be fewer ‘Adarsh’ like scams that can add to the public budget. Forget the concept of good and pro-active leaders, going against all vigilant odds to satisfy private-partnership, here, we have no leadership, nobody!

But however the issue of political instability does not seem to be nascent in India alone, the U.S is seeing turmoil as well and as a result, economic policies will get more attention and probably get diluted before their actual implementation with India. Under the backdrop of a successful $10 billion deal we seem to forget the lack of direction in the political set-up of the U.S which may cause otherwise.

The required sense of direction is more than just plain leadership; it is to follow by example. Consider the recent bilateral agreement between Russia and Norway on settling their border disputes over the North Sea, it was carried out very smoothly, in a very novel and diplomatic manner which now becomes a model that the world can replicate (especially when it comes to such volatile issues). However, in our case of establishing PPP’s as a norm, we are in need of a similar example in all states. We have a framework in place, but a successful PPP with NO limitations needs to be set as an exemplar.

Bottom-line, as Vikram Kapur had mentioned, we need funds from wherever we can garner them, for which we need FDI, for which we need the US, for which we need to woo Obama! But as the NPM goes, most of this FDI should fulfill the operational directives of the services rather than controlling the strategic administration of resources, for which Manmohan needs to think beyond his bleak chance of a second term in office!

All you can get on PPPs in India

I know that some of you would be familiar with this link -- but this site has a lot of information with news and updates on PPP projects in India. Do check it out if you didn't know.

http://www.pppinindia.com/

The Big Fight -- CWG or no CWG?

Hey everyone, CEA's debate for tomorrow is on the subject of the Commonwealth Games. It will be nice if everyone will attend this as I am sure a lot of pertinent points will be raised on all the botch-ups that were made and it is very relevant to what we study as well.

I also think they will take up the Olympics Hosting issue at the end. For a point :- The paragraph below is from Wiki.

Costs

The initial total budget estimated by Indian Olympic Association in 2003 for hosting the Games was 16.2 billion (US$364.5 million) but escalated official total budget estimation in 2010 became 115 bn ($2.6 B), which excludes non-sports-related infrastructure development in the city such as airports, city beautification and roads.^[18] Business Today magazine estimated that the Games cost 300 bn ($6.8 bn).^[19] The 2010 Commonwealth Games are the most expensive Gaming event ever.

There was an article once in the Hindu which had a big list of incomplete infrastructure when the commonwealth games was inagurated. I can't find it, but when I do, I'll post it in the comments.

Srinath

Water Woes in Chennai

India, in many ways is reeling under an acute shortage of water.The main reason cited,which was highlighted during the class, was the need for more efficient use of the available resources through the construction of appropriate infrastructure.

South India is blessed with the presence of numerous rivers but the situation in a state such as Tamilnadu has reached new levels of desperation.Chennai meets a significant portion of its demand from its Desalination Plant located at Minjur,35km north from the city,which has been in operation since 2009.The success of the project has raised many eyebrows and a second Desalination plant at the cost of 1000 Crore is to come up at Nemmeli in a couple of years.The move towards Desalination has been rather nonchalant since the first plant had come up.

Chennai city draws about 600 million litres of water per day from lakes and reservoirs surrounding the city.The present Desalination Plant provides 100 million litres of water per day,making it a very vital component of the water supply chain.However,there have been no initiatives towards replenishment of existing sources or even to repair the losses that occur due to leaks. The need for a new plant can be avoided by stemming up measures in this front.

Water from a Desalination Plant is naturally more expensive and at present,it is priced at Rs 49 per kiloliter,which is nearly four times the normal price of getting water from lakes and reservoirs.Moreover,the 600 Crore Plant at Minjur is based on a DEBOOT (design-build own-operate-transfer) plan,due to which price fluctuations can occur after the firstyear of operation.The Government saw this in positive light as after the first year of operation, elections are due and there is no sense of incumbency among the people when their water demands have been met at a relatively lower price.This issue has escalated to the extent of M.K Stalin,one of the forerunners for the CM position, promising 100 Desalination Plants along the entire south-east coast if his party is re-elected.

Another neglected viewpoint is the environmental damage that a Desalination Plant could cause.There is a need to dispose the highly salty water that is creates by the process of reverse-osmosis.This is normally taken to a distant part in the ocean and dumped.But since its density is much higher than the surrounding sea-water,it settles at the bottom of the ocean floor without mixing with the surrounding water.The high concentrated salt content on the ocean floor is harmful to any source of life and a long term problem in this regards can easily be cited as well.The proposal of 100 Desalination Plants would go miles in fuelling the long term problems mentioned.

Going for Desalination becomes a prerequisite only in the Gulf Countries where,there is no
water source on land.Moreover,Mumbai has four times the population of Chennai and it still has a much better water supply network.The Government needs to recoup all its resources towards the re-engineering of its existing resources to maximize throughput which entails minimal investment as well.The only positive is that the opposing party has not come out with a bigger number of Desalination Plants as an election promise!