Solutions to Change

The urbanisation of India is taking place at a faster rate than in the rest of the world. By 2030, 40.76 per cent of India’s population will be living in urban areas compared to about 28.4 per cent now. So says the United Nations’ ‘State of the World Population 2007’ report, which was released on Tuesday. But at the same time, the report adds, metropolitan cities like Mumbai and Kolkata have a far greater number of people moving out than coming in. It also says that a few cities will be the size doomsayers had predicted in the 1970s. Mega cities are still dominant but they have not grown to the size once projected and have consistently declined in most world regions, the report says. Releasing the report in India, Urban Development Minister Jaipal Reddy said urbanisation was a sign of liberalisation but the condition of slum-dwellers was even worse than that of the poor in villages. According to the report, over 90 per cent of slum-dwellers live in developing countries with China an...

Transmilenio. That is the name of a success story told daily by 1.4 million people in Colombia's capital Bogota. These people are the commuters of the bus rapid transit (BRT) system there, which has 850 buses covering 85 km. It has reduced the travel time by 32 per cent, accidents by 90 per cent and gas emissions by 40 per cent. India's first ever tryst with what has been found so effective in Latin American countries, some American countries and even Bangladesh and Pakistan, has turned out to be a nightmare for some on Delhi roads. The main victims have been the private vehicle users, including school buses. The errors in planning are now being blamed on the BRT system itself, which segregates road space for buses to enable quick transport for all vehicles. If the city planners decide to fold up the initiative, alarmed by media headlines and the traffic mess, then it would be like throwing the baby out with the bath water. The system could have been started when schools were c...

The Delhi Government is hunting desperately for a fig leaf after the BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) fiasco. The Centre has washed its hand of, while the Chief Minister is trying hard to fix responsibility for a system that has left the capital city with massive traffic jams just in its trial run over a 5.2-km stretch, which cost more than Rs 200 crore. Six more corridors are on their way. The idea was borrowed from Bogota, Colombia, which has implemented a BRT network spanning 84 km, carrying 1.2 million passengers per day, and serving approximately 20 per cent of the city's total transit demand. However, traffic congestion is a problem not unique to the developing world, with congested cities. With more and more cars being added on to the roads, the world over experts are looking at solutions to manage traffic, and the answers are rarely simple: BEIJING: With the city’s vehicle fleet expected to reach 3.3 million by August, in time for the Beijing Olympics, persistent air pollution is...

Problem Of Plenty Standing paddy across 10,000 hectares have been destroyed by unseasonal rains. No labour was in supply to harvest the crop in time. Mechanical harvesters couldn't be used since the CPI(M)'s union refused to give timely permission It requires union consent for Kerala farmers to bring in labour from outside or use machines Five farmer suicides in the last fortnight. Drastic fall in the acreage under paddy cultivation of late. Annual rice requirement: 40 lakh tonnes. Production: 6.41 lakh tonnes. *** S ummer has never been so harsh on the hard-toiling farmers of Kuttanad, the rice bowl of Kerala. The profit from farming at best totals Rs 13,000 per acre. Labour accounts for two-third the expense. Acre upon acre of unharvested, standing crop meets the eye as you traverse this 500 sq km, low-lying paddy belt in the coastal Alappuzha district. Unlike the usual story of the debt-stressed farmer taking his life, in Kuttanad much of the tragedy owes to the fact tha...

This is an important month for India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). The Act came into force in 2006 in 200 districts. This month it is being extended to over 600 hundred districts — virtually the whole country. The Act decrees that each rural household has the right to 100 days of employment each year. So the government is required to run rural work programmes where the poor can work. Unlike previous employment-guarantee schemes (with the exception of Maharashtra’s EGS in 1973), the NREGA makes employment a right of the worker. A worker can move the courts if no employment is provided, and is, in such an event, entitled to unemployment allowance. I have been reading several evaluations of NREGA and have visited some sites where it is being implemented. It is a well-intentioned programme that involves many dedicated people. But there can be no denying that NREGA has been an overall disappointment. The money spent on it in 2007-08 was Rs 10,133 crores, and, according...

Like charity, transparency begins at home. India's topmost body, created to enforce your right to know, just learnt this the hard way. The Central Information Commission has been caught on the wrong foot after an RTI activist exposed how the commission — known for ticking off public authorities which fail to maintain records, leading to lack of transparency — is itself unable to furnish to the public information as basic as the number and status of cases and appeals pending with it. The reason: it maintains no such record. Faced with proof that a citizen cannot know the status and pendency of cases in the commission, a stunned chief information commissioner Wajahat Habibullah has ordered inhouse upgrade of records. Habibullah's orders to remedy the "grevious defect" came recently after his public information officer admitted the commission kept no record of judgements and orders passed or pending on cases heard. "The CIC’s registry will take immediate ste...

Industry body Assocham said on Monday that over $13 billion is spent every year by about 450,000 Indian students on higher education abroad. Over 90 per cent of students appearing for the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) and the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) entrance examinations are rejected due to capacity constraints, of which the top 40 per cent pay to get admission abroad." "Over 150,000 students every year go overseas for university education, which costs India a foreign exchange outflow of 10 billion dollars. This amount is sufficient to build more IIMs and IITs," it said. The primary reason for a large number of Indian students seeking professional education abroad is lack of capacity in Indian institutions. The trend can be reversed by opening series of quality institutes with public-private partnership by completely deregulating higher education, Assocham President Venugopal Dhoot said in a statement. Higher education in India is subsidised as an II...

According to a Planning Commission report, while India is short of six lakh doctors , 10 lakh nurses and two lakh dental surgeons, Indian doctors who have migrated to developed countries form nearly 5% of their medical workforce. "The group is of the view that the only way to accomplish this (bridging the gap in doctors) is for the medical education sector to be opened up completely for private sector participation. Other entry barriers such as the requirement of land and built-up space need also to be lowered to realistic levels in order to facilitate the opening of new colleges. Government's role should be limited to opening a few high quality institutions dedicated to research," the report said. The report also drew attention to the very low turnout of personnel with post-graduate degrees. To combat these shortages, the 11th five-year plan envisages setting up of six AIIMS-like institutions and upgrading 13 existing medical institutes. It is planned that 60 new ...

Category Score World Rank Regional Rank Overall 6.2 36 of 115 8 of 18 Legal and Political Environment 5.9 40 of 115 7 of 18 Judicial Independence 8.2 13 of 115 3 of 18 Confidence in Courts 7.5 10 of 115 3 of 18 Corruption 3.3 59 of 115 10 of 18 Political Stability 3.3 92 of 115 11 of 18 Physical Property Rights 7.4 20 of 115 6 of 18 Property Rights Protection 7.8 25 of 115 7 of 18 Registering Property 8.2 59 of 115 14 of 18 Ease of Loan Access 4.6 21 of 115 6...