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Stay on
‘strange’ verdict Power
tariff hike |
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In post-Osama
Pakistan
India
needs high-speed trains
75,
still batting
CREATIVE
CATACLYSM In need
of design dynamics
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Power tariff hike
The
recent across-the-board hike of an average of about nine per cent in Punjab power tariff is a chilling reminder that the unbundling of the State Electricity Board has not made a discernible difference to the efficiency of power generation in the State. With the Government failing to boost generation of power, it is purchase from other states which is keeping the power situation from seeming grim and unmanageable. The chairperson of the State Electricity Regulatory Commission, Ms Romila Dubey, admitted to reporters while announcing the tariff hike that there was no prospect of increase in generation in 2011-12 and that it was only the following year that there could be some hope of augmenting the supply from within. Punjab gets about one-sixth of its supply from other states and that entails high cost. With elections in the State only a few months away, any attempt to reduce the revenue gap by increasing power rates must, however, be commended as a worthy move, however qualified the welcome may be. Significantly, while Punjab’s revenue from power generation is dipping and is sought to be now augmented, the State’s power subsidy bill is increasing. The Punjab government will have to shell out Rs 4,188 crore to power companies in 2011-12 for providing free power to farmers and another Rs 378 crore of subsidy to scheduled caste domestic consumers. It is unfortunate that successive governments squander limited resources on pandering to vote banks while they should be spending on building up power generation capacity. Another area of deep concern is the high transmission and distribution losses which hover around 25 per cent despite the commission having set a target of 19.5 per cent. Pilferage of power goes on under the very nose of political bosses who tend to look the other way. Punjab must indeed get its priorities right. New capacity for power generation needs to be created post haste. At the same time, subsidies must be reduced substantially. Losses in transmission and distribution too need to be reined in for which politicians must act with a greater sense of responsibility.
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In post-Osama Pakistan
The
killing of Al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden by US forces in Abbottabad, Pakistan’s garrison town, has thrown Islamabad into a quagmire from which it is unlikely to come out unscathed. Pakistan is under considerable pressure from the US to reveal the names of the ISI operatives who must have helped Osama to live comfortably in a palatial building at Abbottabad, not far away from Islamabad. No one in the international community is prepared to take Pakistan’s explanation seriously that it had no knowledge of the Al-Qaida mastermind’s whereabouts. It was practically not possible for him to survive in a town having a major military academy without Pakistan officially shielding him. In fact, those who decided to take the grievous risk of allowing Osama to continue his operations from Abbottabad worked against the interests of their own country. They deserve to be punished first by the people of Pakistan for jeopardising the interests of their country. The role of the international community comes later for making the Pakistani rulers pay for their follies. Pakistan Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani says that Osama remained alive and active on Pakistani soil because of the failure of international intelligence agencies (read the CIA of the US) to gather concrete information about him since 9/11. In his opinion, it is the US which is responsible for Osama’s emergence as the most dreaded terrorist of the world. Osama, as Mr Gilani wants the world to believe, was the product of short-sighted US policies, which worked well till the Soviet Union as a super power remained entangled in Afghanistan. But the same policies proved disastrous in the post-Soviet Union era that began in the early nineties. Yes, no one can deny that Osama was a product of flawed US policies. But Pakistan, too, worked against the global cause of peace by providing a safe haven to the world’s top terrorist. The rulers in Islamabad are even now not wiser, as they are allowing another dreaded terrorist, Dawood Ibrahim, to live as a free man in Pakistan. The world must take a serious view of the adventurous policies of Pakistan.
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An educational system isn’t worth a great deal if it teaches young people how to make a living but doesn’t teach them how to make a life. — Author unknown
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India needs high-speed trains
High-speed
train corridors have been talked about by Railway Ministers for over a decade. However, Ms Mamata Banerjee for the first time was honest enough to admit in her last Railway Budget speech that nothing much had come out of the past She now proposes to hire a Japanese consultant to carry out a pre-feasibility study of a 160-250 kmph high-speed corridor on the Delhi-Mumbai leg of the golden quadrilateral, to be later on extended to other sections — Delhi-Kolkata, Kolkata-Chennai and Mumbai-Chennai. After all, the Japanese were the first to conceive and implement the high-speed “Shinkansens” almost half a century back, in 1964! “Imagine whisking through towns at speeds over 100 miles an hour, walking only a few steps to public transportation, and ending up just blocks from your destination. Imagine what a great project that would be to rebuild America.” With these famous words in a speech delivered on April 16 last year, President Obama announced a new vision for a high-speed and inter-city passenger rail service in the US. It was also a part of the extensive packages put together by his administration to revive the economy, develop infrastructure, start new manufacturing activities and create jobs. At the same time, it promised to reduce overcrowding of roads and resultant carbon emissions. However, the high speed (over 250 kmph) concept is useful only when it helps to connect cities within a 500-km radius. It helps to slow down, sometimes even halt and reverse migration from the Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities to major urban centres such as metros. Thus, it has been highly successful in countries such as Spain where all major cities are located within a 500-km radius of the nation’s capital — Madrid. It could be ideal for linking cities such as Ludhiana-Delhi, Chandigarh-Delhi, Delhi-Gwalior, Chennai-Madurai, Mumbai-Ahmedabad and Kolkata-Dhanbad. China’s very own bullet trains — a pair of “D” trains, capable of a maximum speed of 250 kmph — leave Shanghai and Beijing everyday at the same time, at 10.50 hrs, reaching their respective destinations 1,463 km away at exactly 20.49 hrs or just under 10 hours, maintaining an average speed of 146 kpmh! Back home, the superfast Rajdhani Express, the pride of the Indian Railways, covers 1,389 km from Mumbai to Delhi in 17 hours, clocking an average speed of just 82 kmph! However, think-tanks in China have now realised that high-speed (250 kmph and above) corridors on long distances such as between Beijing and Kowloon in the south end up being too costly with no appreciable benefits. ln India, too, a slightly higher average speed of 160 kmph, for which the Railways also would not have to shell out mega bucks for upgradation, would be quite adequate for the Delhi-Kolkata journey to be completed in just over nine hours, and the Delhi-Mumbai run under nine hours, giving a business traveller enough time not only to complete his work but also save on hotel bills! Of course, trains running at an average speed of 250 kmph, completing a journey from city-centre to city-centre in just under two hours, would also save a traveller hassles of a long travel to and from the airport, security checks and the uncertainty created during those foggy days. Trains may be delayed, but you don’t have to cool your heels in the passenger lounge waiting for the announcements, and, last but not the least, they will always take you to the intended destination and in one piece! British Rail, in an attempt to recover from its disastrous experiment with privatisation that saw its safety record plummet, decided to go high-speed and a couple of years back opened up a 109-km stretch from London’s St. Pancras station to Folkeston, to join up with the European Railway, which has been running trains at over 200 kmph for almost a decade now. However, such upgrades do not come cheap. The London-Folkeston high-speed line cost about £5.8 billion, and took almost 22 years to plan and build while St. Pancras station alone cost another £800 million for the upgrade. Given the hassles of air travel, a harried businessman may prefer to make the journey from Paris to Zurich in just four-and-a-half hours by train. In fact, the TGV recently established a record of 574 kpmh on test runs, heralding the arrival of an era of high-speed inter-city trains which give the airlines a run for their money. Modelled on the Tokyo-Osaka high-speed line, built in the 1960s, the French introduced Tre Gande Vitesse (TGV) in 1981 between Paris and Lyon, and now the recently commissioned TGV Est promises to cut down the transit time between Paris and Strasbourg by half, from four to just two hours, and between Paris and Luxembourg from over three-and-a-half hours to just over two hours. Spain’s ambitious project to develop high-speed rail links connecting every major city would soon be connecting the urban dots along the coast by 2020. This would place almost 90 per cent of the population within a few dozen kms of a high-speed rail line, elevating Spain to the world’s top ranks in terms of high-speed rail transport. Already, its Alta Velocidad Espanola (Ave) trains, with an optimum speed of about 300 kmph, provide transit times of one-and-a-half hours from Madrid to Cordoba and Zaragossa, while to Seville they take two-and-a-half hours. The proposed new Madrid-Barcelona high-speed link, covering a distance of 504 km, about the same as Delhi to Lalitpur near Jhansi, would cut the existing transit time of five hours to almost half. In Japan, the land of the Bullet train, a tilting Shinkansen is now being tested to enter service soon to run at 320 kpmh while Germany’s Deutche Bahn has recently introduced a Sprinter service which reduces the Cologne-Frankfurt transit time to under three hours, and Cologne-Munich to just under four hours, enabling businessmen to finish their work and get back home in time for
supper! The writer is a former member, Railway Board.
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75, still batting Dhoni
hits a six, reaches the target and wins the world. One cannot do so while one is playing life’s cricket. One moves ahead run by run. Today I have completed the 75th run and am still batting. I may warn those who have just started playing life’s cricket and are between the 13th and the 35th run (adolescence and youth) that the 11 fielders that surround the batters are – lust, gluttony, greed, depression, anger, envy, pride, intoxication, laziness, procrastination and falsehood. They are eagerly waiting for an irresponsible shot from the batter so as to end his innings. I am happy that I played cautiously then and now live with George Burns’ quote: “You can’t help getting older, but you don’t have to get old”. It is not that the birds of sorrow never flew over my head during the past 75 years but I have prevented them for building a nest in my hair. And when Ram Kumar, superannuated broadcaster, interviewing me for Shimla Doordarshan introduced me to the audience as a person “volunteering time and money for the causes that his heart believes in” and read an Urdu couplet, “Ajeeb shakhsh hai, manzil pe nahin rukta/ Safar tamaam hua phir bhi woh safar mein hai”, I felt humbled but pepped up. Ratan Tata, who would be completing 75th year in December, had recently announced his wish to be 20 years younger than his actual age not because he wanted to be glued to the chair but to see India ‘really shining’ because he felt that the country was passing through an extraordinary transitional phase and would peak in the coming two decades. I feel differently because no one can go back and make a brand new start but anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending. I do not know where will I end but when I was taking the 75th run, tsunami hit Japan and I, in front of my TV, spilled out tears for those who lost their lives, loves and living. The institute of geophysics announced that the Japan quake was so powerful that it shifted the axis around which the earth rotated and that the length of each day would be reduced by 1.8 microseconds. Amidst the pictures of agonising tragedy, I felt optimistic that my next runs in the playing field are going to take slightly lesser
time.
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CREATIVE CATACLYSM
Remember
the old adage -a camel is a horse designed by a committee! Add to that- a government committee led by bureaucracy reaching beyond their administrative mandate, injecting an ill conceived prescription of aesthetics and design sensitivity ! The heady recipe can only be cooked to unpalatable potions of creative experiments gone seriously unsavoury. One does not have to look far. The City Beautiful- Chandigarh, while bestowed with great lineage and above- average planning, is in critical need for an aesthetic make-over. At the very basic levels; broken pavements, haphazard parking nightmares, chaotic roundabouts, electrical wiring hanging like disastrous spaghetti jumbled atop dirty shopping centres, crumbling concrete with plants and trees- engaged in splitting mortar, near absence of evocative public sculpture or art and poorly designed signage, street
Few quality institutions to harness creative aspirations of over a billion
n NIFT (National Institute of Fashion Technology) has over a dozen branches at Rae Bareli, New Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai, Gandhinagar,Mumbai , Hyderabad, Kolkata, Patna, Bhopal, Mohali and
Shillong. Last November, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's Advisor on Public Information Infrastructure and Innovations, Sam Pitroda, declared that most educational institutes in India are obsolete and offer no Asia-centric solutions. Design as an inventive academic discipline has never been taken seriously by policy makers and planners. The appalling lack of design sense in government run programmes and institutions permeates beyond the city infrastructure to the shoddy school and university text books, government forms, stationary and is glaringly obvious just about everywhere one looks. Public spaces have persevered long enough in their ugliness. Urban landscape needs to have a critical dosage of design dynamics. While many politicians, policy-makers, administrators and bureaucrats live in beautiful bungalows and are chauffeured in luxury limos, the sense of design and aesthetics evaporates almost immediately outside their abodes of opulence...only to surface in full-force at gaudy marriage halls and gilded theatre sets that offer colourful backdrops to memorable moments of joy. We live in a design-driven economy. From watches, clothes, accessories, cars, designer ware, mobile phones, laptops to shoes, everything is propelled by how it is styled, designed, branded and enhanced. From graphic design to green design- its omnipotent power is visible everywhere. Design is a vocabulary and an induced expression that spreads on subtle cues and triggers. While the common denominator raises the bar of acceptability, the seasonal variations keep the trendy tempted and tickled to loosen their purse strings. When design moves from personal domains to the public, it offers a catalytic chemistry that breeds more ingeniousness. The design-charged ambience attracts energy and confluence of talent that turns cities like New York, Chicago, Vienna, London and Paris into Meccas of creativity, a reflection of intelligent productivity. Why is it that a country rich with finest artists, sculptors, craftsmen and makers of stunning landmarks like the Taj, Ajanta & Ellora, Red Fort, Palitana, Konark, Jantar- Mantar, and the Baha'i Temple, has difficulty in aligning switch-boards and plug points at right-angles or creating living environments that rise above mediocrity and glide upon the wings of excellence? Why is design disregarded as a viable commercial, ergonomic and aesthetic investment? Why can't a civilisation that draws its roots from the well-planned layouts of Mohenjo- Daro and Harappa, produce a single charming city that epitomizes beauty, cleanliness, public amenities and culture that one marvels at every little hamlet, town, city and metropolis in Europe and elsewhere?
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In need of design dynamics It
was to break the monotony of all pervasive eyesores with a fresh line or a speck of colour that the National Institute of Design (NID) was founded in Ahmedabad during Nehru's time on recommendations made by American designers Charles and Ray Eames in the late 1950s. Sixty years later, India is yet to find its foothold in the world of design, be it revolutionary, path-breaking or universally aesthetic. Western influences and design sensibilities have taken root in consumer and luxury goods while indigenous initiatives are confined to the ethnic pockets of hi-design, far from the millions who live in our cities, work in shabby government offices, commute in awful train compartments and struggle with design- depraved environmental trappings. Imagine an India with traditional ornamentation and design influences adorning urban landscape- making each state a unique poem in the architectural vernacular- a la Santa Fe...from Bali to Barcelona, from Tashkent to Tokyo - among others- edifying an idea of tradition with a cosmopolitan outlook. Though there are 21 areas of design specializations offered at the NID, the litmus test of its performance metric lies in the visual appeal of the city of Ahmedabad itself and in the cluttered cacophony of spatial illiteracy just outside the NID campus, far removed from the realm of design sensibilities as echoed by Nobel Laureate Sir V.S. Naipaul in his writings. The marriage of Form and Function has reached dizzying heights of innovation in many developing and advanced countries. From iconic architecture to material ecology to bio-mimicry, design has spurred growth, cross-over applications, macro- media and mind-boggling nano-technology at sub-atomic levels. From the myth of cosmetic design based exterior enhancements, design and innovation are now widely acknowledged as the key drivers of long-term growth in all sectors. As each invention, service or product reaches maturity and saturation, the next phase of growth can only come from a radical paradigm shift in perception, functionality and revolutionary form. How did they power this movement? By encouraging effective design competitions to solve functional problems while progressively raising standards of excellence. By isolating issues frame by frame and integrating it into a larger cohesive whole has resulted in creating environments and devices that are greater than its parts. Design is also about processes as much as it is about the oft- extolled preoccupation with form. It needs to begin with fundamental shifts to 'Curriculum Design' that makes us intuitively curious and creative. Process design, visual modelling algorithms, tools, techniques and materials are all integral to intrinsic transformative creativity. The magic mix of these ingredients has produced social phenomena of revolutionary proportions as unleashed by Apple Mac, Sony Walkman, Facebook, YouTube and Virgin Galactic and countless others riding the crest of creativity. It is time India offers design solutions that could be life changing- a tidal tsunami of excellence that sweeps us off our risk-averse feet. Memorable marvels akin to the Konarks, the Jantar Mantars and the Ashoka Pillars of yester era instead of reverse engineering that exists elsewhere. In February 2007, the Union Cabinet approved the National Design Policy that called for the establishment of design hubs, training centres, collaborations and establishment of 4 more NID campuses across India as well as encouraging schools of architecture, engineering and sciences to set up design courses and vocational training skills. What is missing from the policy discourse is a serious analysis of what spurs creativity and what needs to be done at the national level to recognize the significance of this issue and make it part of our lifestyle and ethos. Its implementation is in need of a sense of urgency. We must pause to take stock. If not, it may take another 60 years to step back and review the urban chaos that defines our sense of environment and discern the easy import of western design driven solutions, before indigenous thought takes leading edge. India cannot afford this luxury of time. Design has the power to change mindsets and influence change itself. (The writer is a well known museologist, whose work spans eleven countries.)
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names and building graphics- often hand-painted devoid of visual vibrancy and creative thought. As though, this was not enough, even the landmark buildings of this city disappoint; the dilapidated Panjab Engineering College campus far removed from engineering prowess of the 21st century, depressingly lack-lustre museums in sector- 10, semi-neglected Le Corbusier Centre which should've been the beacon of inspiration transporting visitors and a new generation of urban designers and planners to the great expectations and opportunity in a newly independent India. Interiors repel with discordant curtains and mismatched furniture at the Secretariat offices, broken windows and leaky roofs, corners of the buildings used as dumping areas for broken furniture offer just a glimpse of what lies in store of this all pervasive syndrome. These sensibilities went further down the drain and completely vanished from the radars of town-planners of newer colonies and satellite towns around Chandigarh, in later years- shockingly lacking in design, aesthetic sensibilities and devoid of public art that often offers visual vantage to communities. The planners and those who execute the plans have little or no exposure to quality, which adds significantly to the apathy and a sense of complacency with mediocrity.