From old diares…. OCT 2009
This is an article we(Myself and Pradeep) have written two years ago for our institution (Engineering Staff College of India) news letter magazine
The original text:
Infrastructure: A need
Suddenly out of the dictionary’s unread portions, this is one of the words which has been used too many times in the recent past and it will stand important for us, for our future. We all now feel the dearth and importance of infrastructure. We all now know, that good infrastructure would have helped us in our development. We have seen the recession in the west and that led to our economic slowdown, thanks to our financial structure. Several debates arose, and it is expected, had we had, better infrastructure, we could not have faced even that economic slowdown. And even in our last union budget, the need for our infrastructure is addressed and thousands of Crores have been allocated for the infrastructure development.
Leaving aside the routine discussion on what is infrastructure and what to do to develop infrastructure, here we look into the dark(ignored) corners of the same word. So, to develop infrastructure, whom do we need?, the answer is simple, a professional of any chosen field., Engineers in construction and technology related sectors., and doctors, professors in service related sectors. It is the government who governs the education sector, and is partially responsible for the production of good professionals., who are readily preferred to be recruited. Now, most of the companies prefer fresh graduates at the job openings for many reasons, and one major reason in present scenario might be the market economic condition. So, young graduates have opportunity to prove themselves.
A young Engineer will be curious to implement the theories he learnt in believe of the old saying, “Implementation is easy, learning is not”. But do you agree??? I? Personally not. . . .
Even as an engineer, I do not. A short exposure to management theories made me write this paper for the engineers who are future architects of the nation. The architecture these engineers build, is the infrastructure, on which our nation should stand and run., it directly reflects the development of our nation. This infrastructure is the tool for many national functions to run smoothly, that would in turn lead to growth in various sectors. And we are always optimistic about every new work/project. So producing good professionals ,(engineers, in this case) is an important task., this can be achieved with the help of good professional institutes. We don’t have any dearth of such institutes here in India, and even board like UGC and AICTE are looking after all the universities, to maintain good standards of professional education throughout the nation.
We are concerned about producing good professionals, and earlier I said, we are optimistic about our every new work/project, this is feasible, as we have good professional institutions, which can produce good professionals; and even we are optimistic about the usage of the outcome. Here comes the question of using the outcome, so rises the question, who uses this infrastructure. We cannot be optimistic in this case. I want to share an old Chinese proverb which says, “To guess is cheap, to guess wrongly is expensive”. Hmm, this might be the reason we are in fiscal deficit with null benefit. Engineers create the new worlds, but these cannot be put into the wrong hands.
Here, I would like to turn our discussion into another dark corner of infrastructure. What all we are discussing here is to identify the factors that would help the nation’s growth. What is a nation?, It is not the collection of buildings, roads, technology or whatever, but the people or we shall say, the citizen. The citizens are what create a nation, and for its growth, what we need is infrastructure. So it is evident that the attitude of a citizen towards the nation, and his character are far more important in a nation’s development/ growth. I would club these attributes under the name, intangible infrastructure. And we can say, the architectural and service related works as the tangible infrastructure for a nation, and when compared with that, this intangible infrastructure is no less important factor in a nation’s growth.
In assessing the infrastructure of our nation, we can clearly say, we lack infrastructure, which is the cause of slow (than normal) growth rate. And we can tell that because, we know how far we stand from the best things in every sector, in the world. Now, How to asses this intangible infrastructure?. Even I’m new to this word. We can asses that by crime rate and corruption index. It is acceptable if we compare our development with some other countries, but it is not at all acceptable to compare our crime/corruption rate with other countries, and feel happy to stand ahead of others. It is really funny, that I even considered that to write it here. We are seeing many crimes every day, and corruption is ubiquitous. We are even habituated to this corruption. These are the major hindrances to the growth of any nation. And it is highly impossible to kill these immediately. These can be lessened gradually, and atleast it would take a generation’s time. Generation time, means, the time it would take a child to become a cognizant citizen.
So, here is the answer to my previous question: Who uses this infrastructure? The citizens of the country. Citizens include common men, politicians, government servants, and everyone who lives in the country. We can get the optimum usage out of the infrastructure we develop, when only we can hand them over to the best and good people to take care of. We can take the example of the recent floods in the Kurnool and Mahbhoobnagar districts of Andhra Pradesh. The government report says that, the backwater of srisailam dam inundated the Kurnool district. And the local politicians are blamed for delaying the release of flood water. The local politicians, who only focused on the benefits of their constituency, delayed the release of water from the dam, which almost inundated the hydel power station. Its lucky that no major damage happened to the dam structure or the power station. Not to forget that we cannot fight the nature., but we have to do everything to our best. The control of the dam, which should be in the hands of engineers is grabbed by the politicians, who are looking for their benefit, to look good to their people. Is it not the greed of some, that many crimes are taking place?. And the outline of this activity can be called corruption.
We have to align the developments of both of these infrastructures, i.e. both tangible and intangible infrastructures. Our government is acting now to the needs of infrastructure development, and these investments stand around 4% of our GDP. And the investments/expenditure related to the intangible infrastructure is investments in elementary, primary and secondary educations. These investments are around 3.1% of our GDP.
