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Second Innings for Dr Tharoor - Another Chance for Trivandrum!

October 30, 2012, 10:46 pm
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 Image Courtesy: Firstpost.com

With the latest reshuffle of the Union Cabinet, Trivandrum's MP is back at the most important table in the land. There can be few better choices for the Ministry of Human Resources than an erudite scholar and internationally acknowledged author, although it seems that Dr Tharoor requested the particular portfolio instead of a stint back at his forte, External Affairs, in order to focus more on his home constituency. That would be a very rare occurrence in a day and age where most politicians would first look at the personal benefit from a portfolio before even bothering with such optional niceties as working for their constituents.

Many of us would immediately hope that his ascension would lead to a quick solution to all the issues that Trivandrum faces. Let's be practical, no one has solved such a plethora of problems in a single day since that hallowed carpenter of lore from Nazareth. That said, we can expect that Dr Tharoor's new role will help him get better access to the workings within the North and South Blocks, the apex of power of the country and help facilitate key initiatives within his portfolio and beyond.

A few of the key agenda items have been enumerated in this article. Do let us know what you think and whether there are more areas where you would like to see our MP focus on in the year or so left in the tenure of this Ministry. Please drop in a comment here or on the Thiruvananthapuram Updates blog. Thanks in advance.

Once again, let's all join to congratulate Dr Tharoor on his new role and to support him in his endeavors for our city.

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The Irony of the US Election

November 10, 2012, 12:48 pm
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(The following post may sound like a rant, but do read on....)

 Image Courtesy: Patdollard.com

Yes, it's official, Romney lost and what-is-his-name won. Now the electorate have nothing else to blame, after all, one can make a mistake once. The second time, well, that's being stupid. And yes, I was rooting for the other guy because the only economic system still ticking over in the G-8 is the one that did not dabble too deeply into socialist, big Government philosophies.Anyways, that's not the reason behind this post (yes it is...no, it's not!).

Perhaps the most curious thing about the long, bruising campaign before Election Day and the often hysterical celebration after it was not the various nut-cases who took part, the batty ideas which swung votes this way or that or even the assorted gaffes from either candidate, but the fact that one of the groups cheering the incumbent on the loudest was the one which had no business doing so and which should have encouraging the other guy. No, I am not talking about the Jewish electorate, but about the non-voting Indian crowd. Namely, those holding Indian passports and not having the oft-coveted "Green" cards.

It's pretty curious indeed that a set of people who are here on work or education visas, who have no votes and often have no grasp of the real issues or the complex social context of the election, are rooting for the guy who blames outsourcing to India as a reason for job losses in the US, wants to get tough on H1B visas and generally takes a soft stand with China. Did I get it all wrong, but didn't the incumbent try to grill the challenger for promoting outsourcing when he was in charge of real businesses as opposed to being charge of the law library at the University of Chicago?Oh and didn't the challenger say he'd be more open to making sure more qualified immigrants (read Indians) would be invited to live and work in the US? Maybe I got it all wrong.

In addition to a storm of activity on the favorite medium of all arm chair activists and intellectuals - Facebook - where many of my closest friends, now in the US on H1Bs and F1s, were rooting for Obama and dissing Romney for not supporting windmills and solar cells, his stance on abortion and for threatening to deport illegal aliens (no, not cute lil' green men!), there were even some folks who went around with Obama-Biden buttons! 

The most ironic image that comes to mind is coming across an Indian gentleman in a subway train on election day, carrying an "Infosys Technologies" backpack yet wearing not one, but three "Vote for Obama" buttons. Does he want his H1B and his job, or want to see the guy who wants to end all that in the White House?!

Anyways, my point is completely different. Being passionate about the democratic process and social issues, even ones completely disconnected from our place of birth, is all fine and dandy. But what galls me is that not even a fraction of this passion is visible for issues at home, in Trivandrum. 

Right now the city is going through a public health nightmare because the State Government lacks the resolve and the interest to find a pragmatic solution. Having proven themselves incapable of implementing an order from the Kerala High Court to re-open the waste processing plant at Vilapillsala, our intrepid CM and his gang are now taking their time trying out various crack-pot schemes ranging from dumping waster into quarries to baling it to burning it in some mobile contraption. Key projects that are of vital importance to the State from the $2 Billion Vizhinjam port to the expansion of the International Airport to the missing-in-action mass transit system are either stuck like fliesin molasses or running around in circles like headless chickens. Ladies and gentlemen, these projects matter to us and our families and pretty much everyone we know, far more than the US Election, unless one plans to pack his/her bags for the Land of the Free permanently.

I am sure a scientific examination will bear out my anecdotal observation that posts, tweets and updates by many Trivandrumites about the US Election would have swamped those, if any at all, about these pressing issues at home by a very significant margin. What difference would a few tweets or a couple of status updates make to Vizhinjam might be the question. What difference do a few tweets and status updates make to the outcome of an election in another country, I ask you back? The point is that the lack of interest for even the most important development issues on the social media is symptomatic about apathy towards these issues on the ground. Also, even the littlest evidence of public support, such as when over 1000 of you read the post appealing for support for the Vizhinjam port and (hopefully) sent emails to the IFC's Ombudsman, can make a real difference. There are people and organizations watching how issues are perceived on the social networks, and there are savvy politicians like Dr Shashi Tharoor, who do take such responses very seriously and respond to them. 

It appears that the current Government takes Trivandrum for a "silent" constituency that can be ignored and abused to the max, which will still dutifully come back and send some of these same MLAs/Ministers back for another five year paid vacation. Without a pronounced communal, caste or political leaning, Trivandrum is the most cosmopolitan of all districts in Kerala, electing representatives from both major groupings. Little wonder that Dr Tharoor chose it to be his constituency, because Trivandrum was the only urbane, educated constituency that would value his world-class capabilities and experience over his lack of a communal-caste-political equation. Sadly, this open and cosmopolitan nature of the Trivandrum electorate has been abused by all parties, the UDF more guilty of the two by some margin now. A perception of apathy from voters only makes the political establishment more confident in continuing the policy of feeding scraps to us and sending the prime cuts elsewhere at our expense.

I am not inciting a rebellion or a lynch mob here (personally I am in agreement with Sir C.P. in his argument that we would be better off on our own!), but if all of us could spend a little more attention to what's happening at home, it might make a little difference for the better. All of us love to play the blame game. Thampanoor gets a few inches of flooding after the latest cloud burst and there is a predictable cacophony calling for the blood of all and sundry, Dr Tharoor being the most common villain, all the way to the right honorable Mr Chandy and his merry band (Yes, New York is still messed up ten days since Sandy dumped about 1/25th the rainfall we receive during one Monsoon season, but Thampanoor has no right to flood!). For everything that goes wrong, there is always someone else to blame. How about us? How many of us would cast our votes based on a development agenda? How many of us bother to cast our votes at all? Has any of us organized or signed an online petition (takes 1/10th the time the average user spends liking the photos of his/her friend's friend's friend's neighbors new puppy!) urging the Government to speed up its act on a critical development project? Yes, our voices do matter. 

Actions matter even more. Even small ones. The next time someone asks about our home city, let's say something nice. Not that it's full of trade unions who would love to ruin any business that happens to set up there, or that hartals are our national pastime, or that there's nothing to do after hours. How about that we are the fastest growing technology cluster in India or that we will soon have India's best port, or that we are a great, safe place to live in? Those are all true, by the way! Or the next time that we have nothing better to do, why not chat about something a little bit more pressing than who will do better on the next episode of The Voice or its local incarnations? Perhaps chat about how we can make our city better. We could even go and meet our elected representative (they don't bite, well most of them don't!) and tell him/her in a very subtle tone that he/she will lose your vote if they don't get their act together and fight for your city. It's a lot less fun than catching a nice movie for the third time, but it might make a little difference not just to us but our kids and theirs. 

In the end, it all boils down to that eternally relevant dialogue uttered by Prithviraj's character in Madhupal's excellent "Thalappavu" - "Only a responsive electorate can demand a robust Government. Instead of complaining, we must question and react."

Watch from 3.00 onwards.

The next time we reach to click on the "Like" or "Tweet" buttons, let's spend a few seconds on causes more urgent than Obama's latest messiah proclamation or that cute puppy that belongs to someone you barely know. Then we can complain. Then. 


P.S: This was not personal, apologies to anyone who may feel it was. And a heartfelt round of gratitude to all of you who read my appeal for support for the Vizhinjam projectand sent emails to the CAO. Initial reports suggest that we have made an impact, stay tuned! 
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The Life of PI - A Trivandrum Connection

November 25, 2012, 11:43 pm
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When I recently saw the movie adaption of the Booker Prize-winning novel, Life of Pi, little did I realize that the movie and the book that I read a long time ago had a very profound connection with our city and with a place which has created its own share of fond memories for me, over the past three decades.


It appears that the author, Yann Martel, sourced a lot of his inspiration behind the rather eccentric premise of the book from time spent in the Trivandrum Zoo in the 1990s. In fact, it seems that many of the characters including the rather dashing Bengal tiger that plays the supporting role in the book and film, were based on real animals that he observed at the zoo.

Curious?Read on here and then check out how the lilting title credits music seems to tip its hat toward a very famous and familiar tune also connected to Trivandrum.

And yes, all of us who scoffed at the idea of visiting the Zoo when we grew out of our school shorts (and pinafores), we should reconsider knowing that one of the most popular literary works of the last decade, one which many of us would proudly add to our reading lists, had its roots in that very place.

The connection of our Zoo with Life of Pi was reported in the media in 2002. Had it been anywhere else, and that very fact could have been used to bring in a few million very curious and very interested touristsfrom across the world. Kerala Tourism, are you listening at all?

P.S: For the best collection of photos and news updates about the Zoo, do browse through this forum.
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A Vision for Kovalam?

December 2, 2012, 2:10 pm
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The Tourism Department has very belatedly proposed a master-plan to develop Kerala's original and premier tourist destination, the famed beaches of Kovalam, with a view to foster planned and sustainable development over the next 30 years. Is there a sure and simple way to do this?

In early November, The Hindu carried a report that the Tourism Department has decided to carry out a master-planning exercise for Kerala's flag ship tourism destination - Kovalam - that helped launch the tourism industry in the State just as surely as Technopark is solely responsible for bringing IT to Kerala. Surely, they'd have thought about it in the 40 years that have elapsed since the first tourists lounged on the sands of Kovalam? Subscribing to the universal Indian adage that late is always better than never, we should perhaps be thankful that the Department remembered that Kovalam still exists despite their best efforts, and still draws more foreign tourists than any other place in the State. With the rapid emergence of Trivandrum as a metropolis with a strong presence in IT, education and medical value travel, it's a no-brainer that the tourist traffic to the city will only increase in the future, fostered by concepts such as Meetings, Incentives, Conventions and Exhibitions (MICE) tourism and by the new-found fame of the city's patron deity and its lovely zoo.

Considering the fact that the nearly every inch of beach between Vellar and Poovar has a resort on it and that there's not much spare land left in this densely populated coastal belt, one would wonder if there is any point left in a master-plan. After all, if there's no developable land to plan, what use is a master-plan? Well, maybe there is still something that we can do.

Before we see what can be done, let's quickly look at what has already been done because this is not the first time a "master plan" has been proposed for Kovalam. Back in 2005, a Special Tourism Zone (STZ) was put together for the Kovalam-Vizhinjam region, although the jury's out on whether it ever came into effect or not, with almost everyone concluding that it didn't. In sum total, it was not much of a master-plan and never a development plan by any standards because all it did was suggest land-uses for various regions in the Kovalam-Vizhinjam area as well as development guide-lines that essentially spell out what can be built and what cannot be. No details of how the zone is to be developed are mentioned and it omitted key areas such as Poovar and fails to even acknowledgethe $2 Billion Vizhinjam deep water port project located right in the middle of the tourism zone (Pssst....don't let the resort lobby hear that!) In short, it doesn't help anyone much.

 Different Zones in the Special Tourism Zone, 2005

 Suggested Land Uses within the STZ, 2005

So what needs to be done better? First and foremost, the Tourism Department needs to understand that while the master-plan exercise is essentially under-pinned by an urban design process (yes, most of the area is within Corporation limits and wholly within the Trivandrum metropolitan region), to be truly effective it also has to combine policy and development strategy components to become a holistic and implementable Development Plan. Next, it needs to acknowledge that there is very little additional land available in the area and thus must focus on enhancing the existing tourism cluster as much as on developing new facilities. Third, the exercise has to be truly forward-looking, in terms of anticipating emerging trends in tourism rather than looking back at the past to chart out the future. Finally, the Plan has to be backed by action and adequate funds, the latter usually a necessary condition for the former, and both dependent on the will-power and interest to execute among the powers-that-be. In order to keep our recommendations short and simple, we will focus on three key aspects - urban planning, infrastructure and development policy.

Urban Planning

By definition, urban planning is a scientific and political process which seeks to create a holistic plan for urban development by integrating land use planning, urban design, transportation, infrastructure and so on. This is exactly what the tourism zone needs.

First things first, what area are we talking about. I'd go out on a limb and call for everything from Veli (at least) in the North to the Poovar Estuary on the TN border in the South to be included in the Development Plan because common aspects like the focus on tourism, the coastal location and so on are shared and because the overall idea is to create the best experience for tourists and the local community as a whole. That said, it seems that the Tourism department likes to confine the scope to between Kovalam and Poovar. An extension up to Thiruvallam should definitely be considered. 

As mentioned in the STZ report, the area under consideration should extend a few kilometers inland to give adequate scope for development. This means an area roughly 23 Kilometers long and about 3 Kilometers wide, totalling 75 Square Kilometers or 18750 acres, give or take. Not a piddling patch of land by any stretch of the imagination, especially not in our State where every square foot counts.

While there are a wide variety of approaches that can be followed to kick-start the urban planning exercise, the most intuitive is to identify key nodes and paths (following in the footsteps of Lynch himself), as well as the pre-dominant uses - both current and future - and then to see what changes need to be made, if any, in the existing structure to arrive at the optimal solution. In the case of the Thiruvallam-Kovalam-Poovar zone, this is relatively straightforward, at least in terms of nodes and paths. The zone is pretty linear (23 Km X 3 Km). Key nodes include Thiruvallam, Vellar, Kovalam itself, Vizhinjam and Poovar with sub-nodes within many of these such as the three key beaches at Kovalam - Samudar, Eve's and Light House. The key path is the National Highway 66 till Kovalam and thereafter the Kovalam-Vizhinjam-Balaramapuram road, recently renovated by KSTP for the Vizhinjam project. An additional node that will soon gain in importance will be the Vizhinjam port itself, while the widening and  completion of the NH-66 till Kottur will make it the dominant path for the entire stretch. Tourism and fishing are currently the pre-dominant uses while port-based logistics will weigh in soon enough. The area is also densely populated with houses making up the vast majority of existing structures.

A simplistic solution to propose is the creation of self-contained activity clusters at each key node, by the planned development of mixed-use projects that include retail, commercial space and infrastructural components such as bus stops and parking facilities. This can be accomplished through a combination of passive incentive zoning and active PPP-based development. The tourism zone currently has no modern format retail and beyond the few souvenir shops that dot the sides of the road, little organized retail of any sort. This is a major missed opportunity for a destination that attracts millions of tourists every year. The same holds true for entertainment, beyond the Sun, sand, surf and the spas. The nearest decent movie theater is a long way off, for example. The mixed use clusters should be planned to provide a wide variety of shopping and entertainment options including multiplexes and restaurants, cafes and pubs.

The key paths would continue to be the NH-66 and narrower but still adequate coastal road developed by KSTP.  Additional paths could potentially be developed, such as a revived National Waterway 3, a new MRTS line and the mainline railway itself, as and when commuter rail services become operational and the nearby stations at Nemom and Balaramapuram become developed.

The urban design would need to preserve and enhance the natural beauty of the area which is a key attraction, by protecting green areas and adding landscaped areas in public spaces and mandating green areas for new and existing developments (already a part of most low density resorts). Most importantly, while upholding the development controls of the CRZ/CZM regime, the urban design guidelines should not be restrictive and should encourage significant new development. For example, restrictions on the aesthetic design of resorts (such as all roofs must be made of tiles and sloped between X and Y degrees from the horizontal!) are usually unnecessary as long as environmental quality is maintained. 

Infrastructure

As with any urban development project, the Kovalam master plan will encompass transportation, power, water supply and waste disposal infrastructure. In addition, because it focuses on a specific sector for its economic impetus, it'll also need to develop sector-specific infrastructure.

The NH-66 will play the role of an axial connector from Thiruvallam till Kovalam. Since the stretch between Kazhakkoottam and Kovalam will be developed as one with urban character, it will have the requisite service roads and street lighting to more than adequately meet the needs of the tourism zone. The NH-66 will also serve as the primary access road for the zone from the North and the South. Thereafter, the Kovalam - Poovar road, developed under KSTP to act as a preliminary construction access route for the Vizhinjam project will do duty as the primary access route. While this road has been widened and strengthened, it needs more work - street lighting, signage and junction improvements including signals.

Looking further ahead, the Kovalam-Poovar tourism zone needs to plan for connections with upcoming mass transit systems. At long last, the MEMU services along the Neyyatinkara-Kollam mainline have gotten rolling, with a strong final push from Dr Tharoor. As these commuter trains increase in frequency over the coming months, it will be helpful to plan feeder bus connections touching the nearest stations such as Nemom and Balaramapuram and various key locations in the tourism zone. This will also apply to the first route of the Trivandrum MRTS which will run along the Karamana Kaliyikkavila road till Neyyatinkara. As the MRTS network does expand with new lines, a top candidate for a new line will be an alignment that connects the tourism zone and the port with the central urban core, the Airport and other transportation hubs. This should be included in the Master-Plan and forcefully be put forward to the agency implementing the MRTS project.






A couple of possible MRTS networks that include lines to Kovalam-Vizhinjam 

With thousands of hotel rooms in addition to tens of thousands of residences in a very densely populated semi-urban area, there's a strong and urgent need for urban infrastructure for water supply, sewerage and municipal solid waste (MSW) disposal, in the area. There are some initiatives to provide an effective water solution in the area in association with the Vizhinjam project and with funding from the Tourism department. But a comprehensive development plan needs to include a comprehensive solution to the water needs of the area rather than a patchwork of schemes and this component of the plan should be forward looking, anticipating needs from the development spurred not just by the plan itself but by the growth of India's deepest and most efficient port. A high-capacity line from the city's main water-supply following the NH-66 can be supplemented with water drawn from the Vellayani Lake and the Karamana River, but the critical link will be to lay the distribution lines, which has repeatedly proven the Achilles' Heel of various water supply and sewerage schemes in the past. The same applies to sewage treatment for the area, where most resorts depend on their on treatment plants or septic pits to dispose of their waste. Considering the fact that it's a densely populated region located right on the coast,, permeated by number of water bodies, it is essential that a sewage network be included in the development plan, to convey waste water to the new sewage treatment plant at Muttuttathara sewage, which would of course need to be expanded well above its current capacity of 104 Million Liters per Day (MLD). There is already a plan to install 1,400 biogas plants in resorts and homes in the area, to make up for the disastrous MSW situation in the city but in the end only efficient centralized processing can be a sustainable solution and this needs to kept in mind as well.
 
We talked about sector-specific infrastructure at the beginning of this section and the top items that jump out in the case of Kovalam-Poovar are a world-class convention facility, a theme park attraction and, of course, the cruise terminal at the Vizhinjam port.

The convention center is a very important addition to the attractions that Kovalam can provide because Meetings, Incentives, Conferencing and Exhibitions (MICE) tourism is becoming a very important driver of traffic across the world and can also help to balance out the seasonal traffic pattern seen at Kovalam, where peak occupancies seen during October - May are followed by an off-season between June and September. Kovalam currently only has one large facility, the 1000-seater Rajiv Gandhi Convention Center at The Leela. However, it's understood that the resort's new owner, Gulf-based industrialist Ravi Pillai, is upgrading the convention facility to a state-of-the-art 3000-seater with an investment of Rs 300 Crores (unless of course, the RP Group is planning to develop the proposed convention center at Aakulam). Additionally, the Muthoot-owned Vivanta by Taj, Kovalam, is adding a smaller 500-seater facility. Being privately funded expansions of existing properties, these projects should be straightforward (unlike the six-year long struggle with the public-private Aakulam convention center complex) and should provide more than adequate convention capacity, making one element of the development plan easy. A theme park, potentially a water-based one, can also help balance out the annual ebb and flow of tourists, as well as draw in new demographies such as kids. An ideal location would be one of the disused quarries in Vellar, at any rate a much better option than filling them with garbage.

The final element of specialized infrastructure is the cruise terminal. The good news is that it's a firm part of the latest master plan of the port, the not-so-good news is of course the ambiguity that still prevails with the timing of its development. While the terminal would be funded by VISL and/or the port operator, including it in the development plan for Kovalam may make additional funding available. Vizhinjam's fishing harbor has been receiving small cruise ships without any kind of terminal for years now and considering that dozens of large ships call at the ports in Ernakulam and Mangalore each year, a deep water port with a purpose-built cruise terminal, that's much closer to the shipping lane and has many more tourist attractions around it, will likely receive a lion's share of this traffic when operational. This would bring tens of thousands of additional foreign tourists to the zone. And if Vizhinjam can home-port some of these ships, it'd serve as a source of room-nights for the resorts.


 The Port of Barcelona - Container and Cruise Terminals
Photo Courtesy: HDTimeLapse.net 
(click on the link to see an interesting time-lapse video)

The final aspect of the development plan for the Kovalam-Vizhinjam-Poovar tourism zone should be a clear and bold development policy framework. Policies need to encompass and govern key areas that will facilitate and execute the development plan such as planning guidelines, fiscal and non-fiscal incentives, funding and an effective oversight and promotion mechanism.

Planning guidelines and fiscal/non-fiscal incentives go hand in hand to facilitate and implement the development plan. While we can imagine whole reams of such guidelines and incentives, I will propose just one set, which may be a little controversial. At the risk of sounding like a proponent of corporate-style tourism, I'd push for a package of incentives that will incentivize the development of large resorts and the establishment of major international (and domestic) hospitality chains. Not that I am trying to play down the contributions and importance of small and medium resorts (which indeed make up more than 90% of all rooms in the area) but my point is that to attract more international and domestic tourists, we need major chains to operate high-end, large capacity resorts because their booking networks and promotional campaigns can reach far further than small resorts or even Kerala Tourism itself can. Having interacted with almost every major hotel chain in the world and having studied the industry in great detail, it's very clear that there are a great number of people out there who depend on the name of the chain to make a booking. They'd rather go where their favorite brand - Hilton, Marriott or Four Seasons - is rather than spend a lot of time researching a destination and then risking a stay in a hotel they are not familiar with. I believe this is one reason why Goa has stolen a march on Kovalam and Kerala in terms of international tourists. The same holds true for Phuket, Malidives or Bali, which have at least one out post of almost every hotel chain one can think of. We need more of these! And this works to everyone's advantage because a higher profile for the destination will lead to spill-over benefits for all classes of hotels, as it very evidently has in Goa or Phuket. 

Counter-intuitively, it is often the bigger resorts which need incentives at the beginning to make financial sense, because of their need for large parcels of land and massive up-front capital expenses. Each five-star hotel usually costs between Rs 80 - 150 Lakhs per room! That is, upwards of Rs 10-20,000 per Sq.ft, which is far more than the most luxurious residential apartment in Kerala. Giving these hotels incentives similar to the IT industry - tax breaks, density bonuses on non-CRZ land (because the CRZ rules severely restrict density) and starting a land-bank, would be a very good idea because the resorts will create direct (taxes, employment etc) and indirect economic benefits (spending in the local economy, employment in support services etc). World-class infrastructure and a guarantee that specialized facilities such as the cruise terminal and theme park would be built on time would also indirectly incentivize major developers and operators to consider taking a risk at Kovalam instead of Mali.

Funding is as crucial as anything else because even the most ambitious and well-drawn up master plan is nothing but a piece of paper without the requisite funds to put into action. This fate has been suffered more often than not by almost every master-plan we have heard about in Kerala. The Tourism sector generated revenues of about Rs 19,000 Crores in 2011. With at least a 20% share in this total, Trivandrum district would have accounted for Rs 3,500-4,000 Crores, and at a mean taxation level of 10%, generated Rs 350-400 Crores of direct revenues to the Government, not counting for indirect tax flows. So an annual budget commitment of Rs 100 Crores to the Kovalam development plan, growing at 10% every year is not a big ask, it's a rightful plough-back. Keeping in mind the fact that great bulk of tourism development is privately funded, this budget could realistically fund the public components of the infrastructure development needed to support the region well into the future.

Finally, we need a pragmatic and effective mechanism to oversee and promote the development plan. This is no easy ask, as we have seen how very large and well-established organizations such as TRIDA and the Trivandrum Corporation have miserably failed at similar tasks over the last six decades. No, Kovalam doesn't need just another inefficient, bureaucratic body to run it into the ground. It needs something autonomous and compact such as Technopark or VISL. A Governing body composed of the powers-that-be (the CM, assorted Ministers, the MP and MLA (s)) and industry experts, to guide an efficient management composed of tourism professionals. It could be called the Kovalam STZ Development Authority or whatever else the Government wishes to but it should have great clarity of purpose, the necessary executive authority and, just as importantly, the necessary budget. The latter can be funded by the Government contribution mentioned above as well as by voluntary and compulsory contributions from the resorts in the area. The compulsory component could be in the form of a tax or cess on room revenues at each resort, a common form of revenue generate for tourism related projects such as convention centers and stadiums, across the world. Indeed, the India Convention Promotion Bureau could be an interesting model to base the development authority on.


There should also be a strong and sustained umbrella destination branding campaign which promotes Kovalam, period! Not God's Own Country or Incredible India but Super-amazing, Awesome Kovalam! It should be handled by a professional branding and advertising agency and funded by the body mentioned above. While small and medium resorts would contribute through the cess/tax levied on them, large resorts and hotel chains would also commit to spending part of their ad budgets on destination branding and also to prominently include their properties at Kovalam in their national and international marketing campaigns. Given how short vacations are becoming and how much business travel is expanding, it'd be safe to say that a large segment of potential visitors are looking to choose between destinations, making the idea of promoting the specific destination amid the clutter of messages out there even more critical. Indeed, Kerala tourism has already rolled out this concept for new destinations like Bekal, making it all the more mystifying that they should not be doing it already at their flagship attraction, that's also the earliest to draw tourists to the State.

In conclusion, let's look at what could be if the Kovalam development plan is well thought and equally well executed.  Sentosa Island in Singapore is a tiny 5 Sq. Km  spit of land in the middle of the Port of Singapore attracts over five million visitors a year. Over the years, the Government of Singapore invested about $250 Million (Rs 1250 Crores) to create a multi-Billion dollar tourist destination which is now a must-see for any tourist in South-East Asia that combines Singapore's own culture, history and flora and fauna with world-class amenities and attractions such as the $5 Billion (Rs 25,000 Crore) Resorts World Sentosa. Kovalam has a much greater area at play (25 Km of beaches compared to Sentoas's 2 Km!), access to a much larger population and far more adjacent attractions, so this certainly is food for thought. At the risk of sounding like a day-dreamer, a great development plan with adequate funds could transform Kovalam into a truly world-class destination that competes with the likes of Dubai, Singapore and Maledives rather than dukes it out with the likes of Goa or Mammallapuram. As I usually end it with, fingers crossed and stay tuned!  


 Sentosa Island, Singapore
Photo Courtesy: Wikipedia.org 

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Welcome IFFK 2012

December 7, 2012, 7:19 pm
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Come December, and there are two events that I look forward to - the good fun and food associated with marking another year spent on this Earth, and the best film festival in India. Sadly, I have been missing the latter for the last three years butas a film lover, I am proud to welcome the latest edition of the International Film Festival of Kerala to the State Capital.


This year, IFFK will add not one but four spanking new venues to its portfolio in the form of the newly renovated Kalabhavan, Kairali and Sree, together with the new kid on the block, Nila. 

 Yes, that's what Kalabhavan looks like now!
(Photo courtesy: Metromatinee.com)

This year too, IFFK has had to dealt with one of the strangest case of counterfeiting in the world, a duplicate film festival being held in Ernakulam and that too with the support of the State Government. The old adage holds that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery but this is ridiculous! 

I am sure IFFK 2012 will be great, I envy all those of you who'll be able to go sample the world's cinema in a dizzying week of great filmography. Enjoy!

Next year maybe.....hopefully.... 
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2012 Round Up - A Forgettable Year

January 13, 2013, 11:59 am
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It's official, there is a 2013, the Mayan Calendar got it wrong or got it too soon. Quite a few souls must have breathed sighs of relief, well, except for those who spent thousands of dollars on life-boats, arks and other assorted devices to save themselves from the Apocalypse. For the people of Trivandrum, a collective sigh of relief at the end of an eminently forgettable year cannot come too soon, albeit the way ahead doesn't seem any better.

Eventhough all bets were off ever since the UDF came to power, with its mix of regional interests representing nearly every part of the State except for erstwhile Travancore, 2012 plumbed new depths in terms of development, or rather the evident lack of it. 

Every single one of the major development projects in and around Trivandrum, with the notable exception of Technopark, has become becalmed or has been sabotaged with extreme malice.

First and foremost, the Vizhinjam project has lost its way since the culmination of the operator bid process initiated by the LDF Government in 2010. After only a single bidder made it all the way to the end, following the disqualification of the second one on "national security" grounds, the Government deemed its bid inadequate to meet its exacting standards and dumped it in mid-2012. At the same time, they were busy handing out contracts for projects in other cities without even the pretense of a tender and dreaming of Rs 1,60,000 Crore bullet trains. Since then, the project has not made any tangible process other than the finalization of its master-plan, in which a small team of citizens, including yours truly, was able to play a small part, with the timely and able assistance of Dr Shashi Tharoor. The project was then hit by a determined attempt by a group of local resort owners to block its development using the ombudsman of its prime consultant, IFC. Not for the first time, popular opinion and reaction rose to the project's support but the jury is still out on the outcome of the sabotage attempt. In the meantime, the Government has dilly-dallied on the environmental clearance, the land acquisition and on the task of finding a new operator. In the wake of failures of bids for major container terminals at Mumbai and Chennai, the best way forward seems to be the MoU route to find and engage a capable operator on mutually beneficial terms, but not a single effort along these lines has been taken. Vizhinjam found scarcely any mention in the Government's much trumpeted, but apparently ultimately unsuccessful investment mega-drama, Emerging Kerala. Without forceful and quick action on finalizing the environmental clearance, identifying a capable operator and getting the construction tender underway, the project looks like it's going to be stuck in limbo for a long time yet, perhaps until the people of Travancore decide to reverse the mistake that was made on November 1, 1956. The only other relatively bright note in this half-a-century old saga is that VISL has achieved financial closure for the project.

Two more long-pending infrastructure projects ended the year as they had started it, going nowhere fast. The 4-laning of the NH-66 between Kazhakkoottam and the TN-Border, not to mention between Cherthala and Kazhakkoottam, that was stuck in the "how wide should roads in Kerala be" debate, has made scant progress. Towards the end of the year, Dr Shashi Tharoor seems to persuaded the powers that be to take a pragmatic step towards breaking the deadlock by getting the NHAI to agree to widen the stretch between Kazhakkoottam to Kottukal where land is already available and then following it up with the rest of the project as and when land is acquired. Hopefully, works should begin in mid-2013 towards widening at least the 28 Km stretch where land is available but 2012 was filled with nothing but traffic congestion and a string of tragic road accidents. This was even more horribly true of the Karamana-Kaliyikkavila, the 4-laning of which has made absolutely no progress since it was announced in the twilight of the last Government. Other than a string of promises to speed it up, precious little has happened on the ground despite intense public pressure and multiple accidents and thousands of man-hours lost every day. While hundreds of Crores are spent on land acquisition for projects in other districts and land acquisition officials meant for the project often diverted to other duties, the desperately needed project to widen one of Kerala's most congested roads gets more and more lost in the endless tangles of red tape.

Meanwhile, the Trivandrum City Road Improvement Project which yielded a major upgrade of the Capital City's arterial roads over the 2005-10 period has made little progress with its last few pending components such as the Thakaraparambu flyover, the Pettah rail overbridge, the widening of the bottleneck at the Pattoor or the widening of the Vanchiyoor-Court stretch. The Government's dilly-dallying with funding for the project and its lack of resolve in moving traders from the flyover site have resulted in nothing further than a few piles being driven in the last 12 months. A tussle over a few trees has dead-locked the widening in front of the Court complex at Vanchiyoor while the State Government seems to have made little headway in working with the Railways on the lone rail overbridge that has now been pending for 7 years. The only silver lining for the pioneering urban infrastructure project is that the Medical College-Kochulloor and the Overbridge-Thampanoor-Aristo stretches will soon be completed despite the best efforts of agencies like the Kerala Water Authority to prevent that ever happening! So even as the Government announced plans to emulate TCRIP at a half-a-dozen other cities, it has shown a very evident lack of resolve at completing the prototype itself.


Another area where Trivandrum was supposed to have shown the way for the rest of the State was in solid waste management. After a year where the waste processing plant at Vilapilssala was shut down after widespread protests over pollution caused by its irresponsible management by the Corporation, and an even more irresponsible response by the State Government, which came up with a series of hare-brained solutions to cover up its inability to solve the issue despite a strong directive from the High Court, Trivandrum teetered on the edge of a public health disaster. The Corporation and the State Government spent more time trading barbs and insults than they did on trying to come up with a pragmatic solution. The former is to blame for running the plant in a predictably unprofessional manner and not expanding its facilities to meet the needs of a growing city and to prevent air and water pollution. The latter showed utter disregard for the health and wellness of the people of Trivandrum, not to mention the cleanliness of the State Capital, and has not shown any genuine interest in solving the impasse which affects the lives of about 2 Million people. Their proposed solutions have included dumping waste in quarries, burning it in a truck and autoclaving it with steam - every single one of which has blown up in their faces (not literally, not yet anyways!) in very short order. Oh yes, the honorable Minister for Health (who happens to have been elected from Trivandrum, although he seems to have long forgotten that inconvenient fact) was on tour in the US at the time the epidemics were at their peak. The year ended as it began, in dead-lock and with the citizens concerned for their health and their lives.

One would think that this is sufficient ground for a Public Interest Litigation, but apparently not. The State Capital's tired public seems to have extended its apathy at half a century of neglect to this issue as well. All the more surprising when a so-called "concerned citizen" did find enough time and money to file a PIL against the first-ever demonstration drive by a Formula 1 car in Kerala, planned by Indian race driver Narain Karthikeyan, because it would violate "speed limits". Lo and behold, it seems that the demo drive, even on a cordoned off stretch of road, was deemed too risky as if everyone else, including assorted cars belonging to Ministers, KSRTC and private buses and every other private individual always drives below 40 Kmph on city roads! In the end, as with almost everything else related to our city, the State Government failed to take a strong decision in a timely fashion (the Tourism Minister was apparently touring Kashmir at the time to study how to promote tourism!) and the whole event, which could have attracted a lot of tourist interest, fell through. I am sure the intrepid litigant has a speed limiter installed on his car or maybe he still drives an old Premier Padmini that can do no better than the magical 40 Kmph. Talk about utter joblessness.

2012 began with much ado about the mass transit project proposed in Trivandrum, but it ended with little or no progress made, and a lot of confusion in between. The project began all topsy-turvy with the Government fixing the route and technology BEFORE the scientific study commissioned through NATPAC. The usual practice is to let the experts study the market and determine the best route network and the most appropriate technology for the particular area, rather than have politicians who have no clue whatsoever about the technical complexities of a mass transit project fix everything based on gawd-knows-what! In the middle of this, the Government also came up with a rather ridiculous "pod-car" proposal. For a while this threatened to further screw up the mass transit system by claiming to share the same route along M.G. Road. While this threat seemed to have abated later in the year, a new one showed up almost as soon as the NATPAC report came out. E. Sreedharan, the Kerala Government's go-to-man for any problem under the Sun, abruptly reversed his very public skepticism of monorails (the multi-hundred Crore fee streams must have been very interesting!) and pronounced himself the savior of the monorail projects in Trivandrum and Calicut. Since then procrastination has been the very definition of the project with a very sketchy detailed (or not-so-detailed) project report being submitted by Sreedharan & Co only a couple of weeks ago, a report which not only reduced the scope of the project nearly in half but also doubled its implementation period (supposedly due to concerns about "land acquisition", which are conveniently absent in the case of its other projects in Kerala). In the meantime, the Government was caught red-handed trying to divert money allotted for the Trivandrum MRTS project to its pet project in Calicut and Sreedharan tried to muddy the waters further by proposing first a heavy-rail metro and then a magnetic levitation monorail in Trivandrum. All in all, we are left with a curtailed project, a completely uncertain schedule, a totally disinterested Government that's only focusing on the projects in Ernakulam (for which they recently moved Heaven and Earth to rubber stamp DMRC as the project agency) and Calicut and nothing more than lip-service about raising funding for the project. In short, our MRTS project is going nowhere fast, especially not when it has been clubbed under one company with its cousin in Calicut. We can guess where the money will go to. My suspicion, something shared by a lot of other people as well, is that the project in Trivandrum was just proposed as a smoke-screen to justify the all but sure expenditure of State funds on a large scale in the project in Ernakulam where external funding still has not been tied up, despite Sreedharan's claims that he takes decisions for JICA and will unlock their coffers for them.

While on the subject of rails, the long pending railway development needs of Trivandrum have made very little headway, other than the commencement of two services announced a long time ago - the Trivandrum-Kollam commuter rail and the Trivandrum-Chennai Duronto - both of which were brought to fruition by the intervention of Dr Tharoor with the Railway Minister and the Chairman of the Railway Board. These services are still plagued by the chronic shortage of coaches that afflict the Trivandrum Division. The development of the Kochuveli and Nemom terminals, which would solve this among other problems such as the congestion of Trivandrum Central and the long list of pending services that are yet to start off due to lack of capacity, have made little or no progress respectively. Add to this, the constant hijacking of key railway offices allotted in the Divisional HQ at Trivandrum to Ernakulam by vested interests in the hierarchy of the Railways and this has been a mixed year at best and another bad one at worst. Since its expansion in 2011, the Trivandrum International Airport's growth plans have also been on ice with the Governent showing little interest in acquiring the 25 acres needed for the next phase of development even while it pushes ahead with acquiring hundreds of acres for the Kannur airport and rubber stamping the filling of hundreds of acres of paddy fields for the Aranmula Airport (yes, there's an international airport planned there!).

The list of woes continues but I will not try to paint an even gloomier picture than it already is. For example, a section of lawyers based in Ernakulam want to wind up the Kerala Administrative Tribunal (KAT) set up in Trivandrum, an initiative of former Law and Ports Minister, M. Vijayakumar. Not content with denying the restoration of the High Court Bench in Trivandrum, this lobby is probably very vexed that the majority of service-related cases that form the majority of the case load at the High Court in Ernakulam, will shift to the KAT and threaten their cushy existance even if it means saving Crores for the State in terms of not having to pay for the expenses of Government officials traveling 200 Km North to testify and participate in these cases. Here again, the only voices raised in protest were those of Mr Vijayakumar and Dr. Tharoor. The Government curiously has been keeping mum.

There have been rare instances of light shining through the firmament of dark clouds over the city. Most notably, Techopark has been making solid progress with completion of its mammoth 1 Million SF first building within its Phase III campus, as construction proceeds apace at the TCS, Infosys and UST Global campuses, adding nearly 3 Million SF of additional space and generating 30,000 more jobs. Infosys also took another 50 acres, this time at Technocity, for its second campus in Trivandrum, that's expected to add another 2 Million SF of space and 20,000 jobs to those in the first campus which is partly operational. The reason that this progress has been unaffected? Because, most of these are independent of the Government. The IT companies are of course paying for their own sprawling campuses and the last Government gave the go-ahead for the Phase III buildings. Despite the rapid consumption of the space available in the new building by companies including Oracle, Accenture, Cap Gemini and ITC Infotech, this Government has taken no step to commence construction of the next building in order to ensure a steady pipeline of space for incoming companies. Surprising, isn't it, especially considering that there has been no significant space absorption in any other IT park in Kerala and that this Government has made no headway with its own Frankstein creation, the so-called "Smart" City? Not so surprising, if the game plan is to put a "take deviation to Ernakulam/Calicut" sign once space sells out at Technopark, a strategy that has been put to use in the past many a time, starting with Wipro and CTS almost a decade ago. On a geographically contiguous note, the construction of the 50,000 seater world-class cricket and football stadium for the 35th National Games of Indian, just 1 Km from Technopark, is well underway. This will be Kerala's first International Cricket stadium and is expected to be open for business towards the beginning of 2014.

In summation, 2012 was not a year to look back on with fond memories. Period. It was a year that should make us wonder about the choices at least some of us made in the elections of recent years. There are at least a couple of people to vote for again (no, I am not trying to influence you.....!). The rest don't seem to care about us, at all. The bottom line also is that there's widespread apathy amongst us, and little urge to act upon this abject neglect for the State Capital. Till we start to react - be it little things like participating in an email campaign for Vizhinjam or correcting your cubicle mate when he/she bad-mouths the city - or perhaps, hoisting the Travancore colors on the 200 foot flagpole at Kanakakkunnu and declaring the end of the 56 year-old travesty that we have suffered. Tempting, isn't it?

How will 2013 be? Who knows, but stay tuned for my stab at predicting if this year will be any better than the last. 
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Technopark Grows by 4,000,000 Square Feet!

January 19, 2013, 12:06 pm
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When I put together the rather gloomy wrap-up of 2012 in the previous article, one of the bright spots that I talked about was that Technopark and Technocity had made steady progress over the year, with little or no assistance from the Government. And when I talk about progress, I mean very, very significant development, of the order of 4,000,000 SF of space that's either ready to be occupied or is fast approaching that stage.

4,000,000 Square feet, sounds like a big, abstract, number? Let me put it in perspective. 

4,000,000 SF is more space than what's occupied in the whole of Infopark in Ernakulam today.

4,000,000 SF is more than 2/3 of the space promised in the much-trumpeted, but long delayed "Smart" City project. Compared to the media frenzy and Government desperation around the latter project, Technopark has been humming along with little if any of the attention and support it deserves. And we didn't need any sheikhs or camels, either (or mirages of gleaming office buildings). All reality, no hype. Probably for the better.

4,000,000 SF of space will accommodate 35-40,000 technology professionals, probably result in about Rs 4,000 Crores ($800 Million) of annual IT exports and inject upwards of Rs 1,200 Crores ($240 Million) in the local economy as disposable income and taxes.

And here it is, in concrete, steel and glass, not on paper!

Technopark Phase III - 1,000,000 SF: Ready to Occupy







The building will soon be occupied by blue-chip firms like Oracle, Accenture, Cap Gemini and ITC Infotech, in addition to hosting India's biggest technology incubator with over 50,000 SF. 

These were shot while the complex was under construction.





Photos Courtesy: Anikuttan, Robin_a_p, Sudheeshnairs and Kirantvm @ SSC Trivandrum and Technopark's official website.

UST Global Tower 1 - 900,000 SF


To get a real sense of how massive this building is, take a close look to the left of it and you'll see a concrete mixer truck being dwarfed by the giant and made to look like a tiny toy!

This was shot a few months earlier.


Photos Courtesy: Anikuttan and Kirantvm @ SSC Trivandrum

Infosys Campus 1: 650,000 SF office building and 1,000,000 SF Multi-level Car Park




Photos Courtesy: Kirantvm and Viveks @ SSC Trivandrum

TCS Campus 1 - 1,200,000 SF Development Center 




A few months ago, the entire area was crawling with piling rigs as the massive foundations for the building were built.


 Photos Courtesy: Shafi and Vjfile @ SSC Trivandrum
 
A lot of us might end up working in these buildings or at least looking at them out our windows soon.

And the next time, someone tries to condescendingly tell you that nothing's going on in Trivandrum, tell them that more business space is under construction in Trivandrum than in most US or European cities right now and more than the rest of Kerala combined!
Oh yes, there's three times as much additional space in the pipeline in theseprojects and in Technocity, where Infosys and TCS will add close to 10,000,000 SF between them. 

Stay tuned!
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A Special Republic Day for Trivandrum

January 29, 2013, 9:27 am
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The biggest tricolor Kerala has ever seen was proudly hoisted on one of India's tallest flagpoles in one of India's proudest cities on January 26, 2013 by the Chief Minister and Dr Shashi Tharoor, who was one of the two people behind the project, the other being fellow MP, founder of the Flag Foundation and billionaire industrialist Naveen Jindal (who was also present at the occasion).

Given its truly spectacular location, at the top of the hill where the historic Kanakakkunnu Palace is located and right in the very heart of the Capital, the towering 200 foot flag will not not only be an inspiration to the citizens of our beautiful city but a sure-fire tourist attraction. Thankfully, it will also be flood-lit at night (provided KSEB spares it the ignominy of load-shedding!).

And of course, here are a few spectacular shots of the monumental national colors.


Image courtesy: Malayala Manorama



Image Courtesy: Anikuttan @ SSC Trivandrum
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A Flag Video!

February 10, 2013, 1:58 pm
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For those of us who can't go over to Kanakakkunnu and watch one of India's largest tri-colors flying in the breeze, here's a short clip of the unfurling of the mammoth National Flag. Personally, it's amazing that such a massive flag (it's bigger than a double decker bus), is flying so briskly. Probably that 200 foot tall flagpole, on top of a 50-60 foot high hill helps!
 
 

Video Courtesy: Reporter news channel

Can't wait to see it with my own eyes!
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Vizhinjam - Turning Turtle?

March 11, 2013, 8:13 pm
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An abrupt change in strategy by the State Government threatens to set the Vizhinjam project back by years if not scuttled for good. It's urgent that the misconceptions being created around this move be discussed and prompt action be taken to ensure that the project stays its course to fruition.

Right at the beginning let me say that this article is not about the imaginary sea turtles that that resort lobby tried to use as one of many reasons in their attempt to erect an environmental hurdle before the Vizhinjam project. Nor were any turtles or other wildlife hurt during the writing of this post. It’s about the U-turn that the State Government has taken in recent days about the State’s supposed “dream” project and how this move threatens to make the $2 Billion project go belly-up. Hence the allusion to the turtle.

The Landlord Model

As many of us know, in the last three or four years, from the twilight of the LDF Government through nearly the first two years of the UDF Government, the key term used for the Vizhinjam project was the “Landlord model”. In this structure, the State Government acts as the “landlord” of the port by building all the key basic infrastructure including the breakwater, the berths and quays, the backup area as well as road and rail connectivity. The private “operator” brings in the terminal infrastructure, the quay and gantry cranes, and operates the terminal(s).

 
The Landlord model of Port Development


This model was adopted after the failure of two consecutive pure Public Private Partnership (PPP) bids, in 2005 and 2008. In the pure PPP model, the private concessionaire is expected to finance the entire project, design it, build it and operate it for a specified period, in this case 30 years. This is also called the Design-Finance-Built-Operate-Transfer (DFBOT) model. However, this model is relatively unattractive to a private developer because all the project risk is passed on to it and the entire burden of raising the funding for the project, in this case close to $1 Billion (Rs 5000 Crores) just for Phase I, is placed on its shoulders.


PPP Model

Even with assured hinterland cargo and existing infrastructure in place, this model has fallen out of favor for port projects. For example, bids for container terminals in India’s two biggest container ports, JNPT (Mumbai) and Chennai as well as it first corporate port, Ennore, have failed multiple times in the past two years. We need to remember that all these ports already have much of the infrastructure – especially the breakwaters and the channel/harbor basin already in place and all three have access to existing cargo traffic (Mumbai and Chennai both have been working well over capacity). Even then, the bids failed. Vizhinjam is completely green-field - all the infrastructure has to be built from scratch. Moreover, it has to capture traffic from other ports, established ones at that, like Colombo, Salalah and Singapore to build up its own market as well as establish links with the hinterland in South India which is currently served by a multitude of ports. There’s no doubt that with its vastly superior draft, location and operating cost advantages, Vizhinjam will build up traffic very rapidly but that will take time and it adds to the risk profile of the project. Secondly, the benefits from core infrastructure projects are often more indirect than direct in nature. The former, including taxes of various kinds, customs duties, indirect employment and disposable income increases and so on, could easily outweigh direct benefits such as the limited employment that the highly automated port itself would generate or cargo revenue it would collect. The Government can tap all these indirect revenues through its broad taxation powers whereas the private developer only has access to the direct port revenues. Forcing the latter to fund the entire project itself will decrease the likelihood of any revenue share coming to the Government. Thirdly, the cost of capital to a private player tends to be more expensive than to a sovereign entity like the Government. Even a couple of percentage points of difference in interest rates would mean a massive sum when we are talking about over $600 Million (Rs 3000 Crores) of debt!


All told, the Landlord model allows the Government to de-risk the project by assuming the responsibility of building the common infrastructure using its cheaper sources of funds (budget support, bonds and debt from public banks). This will help attract the best private operators and will also encourage them to pay a revenue share to the Government once they meet their minimum return on investment target. The Government can recoup the rest of its initial investment from indirect tax revenue from port-related activities. Finally, the Landlord model gives the Government very strong control of the strategic plan and design of the port, whereas in the DFBOT model, almost all control is devolved to the private developer. As has been evident with the “Smart” City imbroglio, where the private developer has been stone-walling the Government for nearly a decade now, giving away all control on a valuable private asset may not always be the best option.


The Landlord model has been and is being used with great success across the world. For example, most of the major ports in the US and Europe are controlled by the respective States or cities. Much of the basic infrastructure has been built by the State and then private terminal operators have been roped in to manage the terminals. Ports like Los Angeles, New York-New Jersey, Houston, Hamburg, Rotterdam, Barcelona and so on are great examples, as are ports in Asia and the middle-East including Singapore. This is not to say that private ports haven’t succeeded in India, some of India’s busiest ports – Mundra, Pipavav and Gangavaram – are private. But these ports have the backing of some of India’s corporate giants and/or have assured captive cargo – mostly bulk cargo like coal, iron ore or crude oil, making them less risky than a greenfield port that focuses on transshipment. Thus, as successful as they are, these are not valid comparisons for Vizhinjam.


The project had been following the Landlord model ever since it was recommended by the project’s strategy advisor, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and accepted by the State Government in 2010. The first attempt to identify an operator for the port ended in disaster in 2012 after one of the bidders, Adani Ports, was disqualified on security grounds and the lone bidder left, Welspun-Leighton, could not come to an agreement with the Government on the financial terms of the operations contract. The lack of urgency on the part of the UDF Government to expedite the security clearance (it took almost a year) and to negotiate pragmatically with the lone surviving bidder ensured that the bid would fail but even then VISL has proceeded with obtaining the environmental clearance for the project as well as the Engineering-Procurement-Construction (EPC) tender formalities for constructing the Landlord facilities, appointing leading global design and project management firm, AECOM, to create a preliminary master-plan and to manage the EPC tender process. Much of this was detailed in an earlier post, where I summarized how Dr. Shashi Tharoor had effectively intervened to ensure that the port’s master plan had critical design features such as draft, turning circle, breakwater and quay length, and so on to ensure that Vizhinjam has unique advantages from Day One.

The U-turn

Having stayed the course so long, it was surprising that in the last few weeks, with just days left till the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) report is received and when the EPC tender is getting ready to go out, numerous media reports started pointing to an abrupt U-turn by the Government on the project’s development model.
It appears that the powers-that-be, a combination of the bureaucracy and their political mentors, now want to shrug off the responsibility of funding and developing the project and pass the Billion-dollar buck back to the private sector, knowing full well that this model is unlikely, if not impossible, to succeed. The stated reason for this change of mind is that the State now wishes to seek Viability Grant Funding (VGF) from the Center to meet part of the cost of the project. 
VGFis a development support mechanism instituted by the Government of India to provide partial financial aid to major infrastructure projects such as ports, roads, airports and so on where the inability of the project developer, especially a private one, to capture all indirect revenues together with the need to maintain user fees (ticket rates, cargo charges etc) to a level that is both market compatible (which users will want to pay) and socially just (where everyone can afford the fees) makes the project unviable without some additional funding. Essentially, we can explain VGF via the following simple equation (ignoring most of the finance behind it such as discounting, present value and so on): 

Total Cost of Project – Revenues that the Private Developer can recover at market supported rates = VGF


Actually, VGF is capped at 20% of the total cost (minus any land component costs), irrespective of whether that would be enough to make the project viable. The reasoning is that if even a 20% grant cannot make a project viable, it’s better not to do it. Once VGF is sought, the State Government’s investment is also capped at 20%, which throws the Landlord model (where the State has to invest between 60-75%) out the window with all its advantages, as we reviewed above. Finally, VGF caps the tariff a project can charge so that the developer doesn’t get the aid and then charge users to make a very tidy profit. However, this restricts the developer’s commercial flexibility and can further hurt the attractiveness of the project at a time when most of the private operators in India’s public ports are suffering in the shackles imposed by tariffs fixed by the dreaded Tariff Authority for Major Ports (TAMP).


One wonders why the Government that was making excited noises (albeit all noise and little action!) about the port project till recently and has touted the supposed budget allocations that they are making for it, suddenly makes a U-turn. Personally, I have three or four reasons that could be behind this U-turn.


First and foremost, some bright soul at the Finance Ministry might have realized the awful truth that the Government doesn’t have anywhere near enough funds for all the projects that it and its predecessor have announced. Add up Vizhinjam (Rs 5,000 Crores), the Trivandrum MRTS (Rs 4,500 Crores), Kozhikode MRTS (Rs 2,000 Crores), Ernakulam MRTS (Rs 5,000 Crores) and Kannur Airport (Rs 1,500 Crores), and the State is looking at investments worth a total of Rs 20,000 Crores in the next three years, of which the State will have to bear anywhere from 20% to 50%, depending on the project. This means that the Government’s outflow could be between Rs 5,000 to Rs 10,000 Crores in the next 2-3 years. That’s Rs 5,000 -10,000 Crores that it doesn’t have to spare. More than 60% of the annual budget, which this year has been fixed at Rs 17,000 Crores goes just to pay salaries and employee benefits. Unless the Finance Minister has a wizard’s hat packed away somewhere, it’s painfully evident that there’s not enough money to go around. Today, Vizhinjam and the Kannur Airport are leading the race to break ground. Vizhinjam will be able to enter construction in late-2013 if everything goes according to plan. Now, here’s where things get positively sneaky. The Kerala Government is planning to introduce a common fund for infrastructure projects from which projects that are making progress will be funded at the cost of projects that are not. As of now, this means Vizhinjam will have to be funded before projects that are much closer to the Government’s heart, as evidenced by the Chief Minister and half the Cabinet camping out once a month in Delhi to get special exceptions or doles for it. If you are still confused, I am talking about the Ernakulam Metro project that has been anointed the “Dream Project” of the State, despite the plain fact that it only benefits one city. The project has not secured any funding beyond the 30-40% that the State and Central Governments have agreed to come up with. There’s the strong potential that the State will have to come up with a lot more if a lender like the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA) doesn’t agree to sanction the entire amount. So, we could be forgiven for thinking that someone in the corridors of power wants Vizhinjam off the funding list to make way for projects that are held far dearer.


Next of course, one might imagine that there’s a certain reticence on the part of senior public officials, both elected and selected to be associated with what is perhaps the single biggest civil engineering contract to be handed out in Kerala’s history, at nearly Rs 3,500 Crores – the EPC contract to build the breakwaters, quays, terminal area and road-rail connectivity. And what could also become the single biggest vigilance investigation some day, considering the turn of events for many an engineering contract, big and small, awarded in the last 60 or so years. The prevalent practice seems to be to pass the buck to someone else, such as the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (increasingly all roads lead to E. Sreedharan’s wife house in Ponnani!).Thereafter any pointed fingers can be redirected to the said agency, for which the latter is compensated generously, in the case of DMRC with a nice, fat, 3.5% fee, that adds up to over Rs 200 Crores for the Ernakulam project alone. Well, it’s the public’s money, why should the powers-that-be worry about wasting a few hundred Crores when they can buy themselves protection. This could be another strong reason for trying to pass Vizhinjam off to the Central Government. And fearful of incurring the wrath of the opposition which was in Government when the Landlord model was adopted, a convenient smoke screen in the form of the PlanningCommission was invented by inviting a senior advisor to the Commission to visit Kerala and deliver a discourse on the virtues of PPP and VGF. A discourse that conveniently omitted key points such as that of the nearly 120 projects awarded VGF till date, there is not even a single port-based project. Or that the Union Government has not ever undertaken a green-field PPP port project till date. Curiously, of the many projects about which the State Government waxes eloquent at frequent intervals, only the Vizhinjam port and the Trivandrum MRTS were found suitable for PPP. Does that mean that the Government does not believe that projects like the Ernakulam MRTS, the Kannur Airport and the Kozhikode MRTS are not viable in the very least such that they have to be completely funded from the State exchequer? Why this sudden special dispensation for projects in Trivandrum? Well, we didn’t ask for any such thing and can we have our tax Rupees invested back in our projects please?!


Then of course, there are the even more directly nefarious elements out there, standing with the usual suspects – Vizhinjam’s competitors. Ports ranging from major transshipment hubs like Colombo and Salalah, which depend on Indian transshipment for survival, to minor ones like Ernakulam, whose hinterland would be encroached upon by the much more cost effective Vizhinjam just 200 Km to its South. It’s hard to believe that some sort of vested interests are not at work when a trumped up shell company called Zoom Developers twice scuttledthe bidding process for Vizhinjam. The same company went belly up and vanished from sight in 2011, leaving in its trail one of India's biggest banking scams and a number of much hyped projects that were never begun, including a ludicrous but much trumpeted proposal to build a 100 floor high tower in Kalamassery near Ernakulam for which the State Government even allotted land! And when the same individual that played a majorpart with Zoom when they scuttled Lanco’s bid through endless and frivolous litigation, surfaced again to “advise” Welspun-Leighton in 2012, one cannot help me suspicious. Going from invisible lobbies to very visible ones, we have seen how much havoc the so-called “resort lobby”, a small but determined and very influential group of resort owners in the port project area, have caused in the recent months. Not only has the Government shown no gumption to challenge these individuals, it’s common knowledge that the leader of this alliance is a close relative of one of the most influential powers that be in the current Government. Little surprise that the project is making little headway.

Isolated Responses

The facts stated above were not gleaned by sophisticated spy satellites or Walther PPK-toting, suede spies, but are widely available in the public domain as highlighted by the links that I have provided, which represent but a fraction of the material out there. Assuming that our elected representatives still read the local newspapers (forget the national and international media or media of any electronic kind), it is indeed mysterious and appalling that, save one, no elected representative from the district (yes, let’s forget than nice Pan-Kerala myth for the moment) has made the chronic lack of progress of the project or this latest U-turn a prime focus of their legislative or civic activities. We count 2 MPs, 10 or so MLAs, 1 State Minister and the Speaker of the Assembly, among the gentlemen and ladies that we cast votes for (not to mention assorted “firebrand” leaders of the CPM and Congress). And save for Dr. Shashi Tharoor, has anyone seen these worthies picketing the Secretariat or sitting outside the CM’s office demanding progress with the project? I sometimes wonder that they seriously believe that inaugurating those swanky new automatic toilets is more important than raising their voice for the single most important infrastructure project in Trivandrum and Kerala.Or perhaps the facts of the matter simply fly over their collective head, if this be the case, we should wish that they resign and make way for a similar number of randomly chosen 7th Standard kids.That’s the intellectual caliber that is demanded here, not that of Albert Einstein!

Either way, only Dr. Tharoor has raised the matter at the highest levels, among our worthy elected representatives. And beyond that, only former Ports Minister and senior CPM leader, Mr. M. Vijayakumar has come out openly against the sorry status that this project has been cast into. The latter has been committed to this project for decades now and it was during his tenure as Ports Minister, that the project made truly significant strides and the present Landlord model was evolved. However, unfortunately, he is no longer the Ports Minister and he can only argue, not mandate, at this time.
This leaves Dr. Tharoor as the only hope in terms of having both the interest and the ability to salvage it.


Soon after the Government stated to leak its intention to switch models at Vizhinjam, Dr. Tharoor intervened with the CM and the Ports Minister and asked that a special Director Board Meeting of VISL, on which all of them serve, be called to discuss the matter which was at the time being clandestinely routed via various sub-committees under the radar of the Board. It’s understood that he very forcefully made the case for the project to continue on its current path, and move to the EPC tender stage before the end of 2013.


Dr. Tharoor objectively rebutted the claims of the proponents of the PPP/VGF idea with facts and figures, forcing the CM and Ports Minister, who were present, to put the brakes on the surreptitious moves to ship the project out to the Center and instead referred it to an “Empowered” Committee of Secretaries to examine Dr. Tharoor’s submission and to see if there was any merit to seeking VGF at all. Dr. Tharoor further questioned why the Government had not further pursued the Government-to-Government (G2G) model that he had proposed long ago to explore the possibility of tying up with a capable State-owned/backed port operator like Barcelona, Singapore, Rotterdam, Hamburg or Antwerp and insisted that any Central aid should be in the form of no-strings attached funding for the road and rail connectivity for the project, which could be executed by the National Highway Authority and Indian Railways respectively. This would cost about Rs 500-600 Crores (the same as the proposed VGF), similar to how nearly Rs 2000 Crores was spent on the rail-road connectivity for the Vallarpadam container terminal in Ernakulam.

One thing is sure, that at least Dr. Tharoor and Mr. Vijayakumar have stood up and argued for the project has put the Government on notice that they cannot get away with tweaking the project’s model in secrecy. Despite the abject lack of coverage in the local media, which still devotes pages and pages to the so-called “Smart” City project that has not seen the light of day after 8 years of “development”, this issue has come out in the open now and I hope that this post will at least make a few more of you aware as to how a project that can change the very face of our State and all our lives is at risk of a quiet, secret burial at sea. And unlike in the case of Bin-Laden, this funeral is being arranged by those who are supposed to be protectors not executioners of the project!

A very recent footnote is the hue and cry raised by none other than the honorable Finance Minister that the Union Budget has not put aside a single Rupee for Vizhinjam when it allocated Rs 7,500 Crore for expansion of the nearby Tuticorin Port and also announced plans to establish two new ports in West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh. All the tears being shed for “poor” Vizhinjam are likely crocodilian in nature because of a few simple reasons. First, Vizhinjam is a so-called State/minor port, it is outside the purview of the Central Government. No formal proposal has been made to the Center for assistance and as discussed above, it’s best that no request for VGF be made. Those calling for the handover of the project to the Center forget (or fully intend to take advantage of) the fact that most projects taken up the Central Government take years if not decades to even get off the drawing board, forget actual construction. The Tuticorin outer harbor project, for which funding was just announced (actual construction might be several years away, if at all) was first planned in 2006. The port in West Bengal, at Sagar, has been doing the rounds for a decade now and even now, no actual project plan or funding commitment even exist! In fact, it's clear that very little, if any, Central funding will find its way to the port.
In short, it's best to let Vizhinjam stay the course and carry on along its part to a speedy EPC tender so that come November 1 (richly ironic in that it commerates an event that probably contributed in no small measure to the neglect that the project suffered over the past 60-odd years), 2013, actual construction work on the project can be inaugurated atoning for so many years of broken, false promises to the good people of Trivandrum. About time that the Government of Kerala put its money where its often loud mouth is. 
I am sure we all agree on that! 
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TCS adds 8,000,000 SF in Trivandrum

March 19, 2013, 6:58 am
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Two-and-a-half years ago, I had reported that Tata Consultancy Services was setting up the world's single largest technology campus in Technocity, by establishing its Global Learning and Development Campus, in essence a residential University for 16,000 trainees at a time (up to 64,000 each year). Now more details and the first renderings of the mammoth project have emerged.

Spread over a whopping 8,000,000 SF (that's as much space as the much-touted but ultimately still-born "Smart" City project promised to create over 10 years) on 97 acres of land and costing Rs 3,600 Crores ($720 Million), the giant campus will train every employee that TCS recruits from across the world.

Oh yes, right across the road will be the approximately 3,000,000 SF Infosys Campus II, where they will accommodate 24,000 employees. Not to mention the 1,000,000 SF that Suntech is putting up next door.

Enjoy the first two prelimiinary renderings and stay tuned for more!


Source: Thiruvanathapuramupdates Blog and the Kerala IT presentation made at CeBIT 2013 in Hannover.


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Bupkis - The 2013 Kerala Budget

April 16, 2013, 4:56 pm
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When the grand young man of the UDF Ministry and the perennial custodian of its exchequer, K.M. Mani, presented the State's budget for 2013-14 a few weeks ago, more than a few people in Trivandrum expected a lot from it - just as they have been forlornly expecting every since May 2011. 

I didn't, which is why as soon as the details were available, I was ready with a concise comment, all of one word long - Bupkis!
Origin
From Yiddishבאָבקעס (bobkes, “(large) beans”), from קאָזעבאָפּקעס (kozebopkes, “goat droppings”), from Proto-Slavic*koza (“goat”), and diminutive of Slavic root боб (bob, “bean”).

Pronunciation

(US)IPA: /ˈbʌp.kɪs/, Yiddishesque IPA: /ˈbɔp.kis/

Noun

bupkis (uncountable)
absolutely nothing; nothing of value, significance, or substance
As can be expected after two years of continuous neglect of the State Capital by the incumbent administration, there was precious little to cheer for the long suffering citizens of Trivandrum. To be fair, there was very little to cheer for anyone outside the core constituencies of the key power centers in the ruling coalition - namely Pala, Malappuram and Ernakulam. But Trivandrum has a particularly strong grouse considering how many initiatives with State-wide impact are underway or planned here.
No Funds in sight
Trivandrum has a plethora of projects, big and small, that desperately needed funding in this budget. The most urgent of these, for the reason that it could cause a public health disaster sooner rather than later, is the establishment of a high capacity solid waste processing plant after the Government failed to resolve the impasse around the Vilappilsala plant even after more than a year elapsed since it was closed due to protests by the local population. Beyond lip service about establishing a waste processing plant in Chalai (which is already at the center of a major controversy due to the shaky credentials of the private companyidentified by the Government to implement it), no firm allotment has been made to build and operate a plant with adequate capacity for a city of over 2 Million people. Meanwhile, the mobile incinerator, procured with great fanfare, now lies idle after it became painfully evident that it was not up to the task and had been just another (comparativelyminiscule at a mere Rs 2 Crores!) white elephant.
Bigger projects such as the proposed 4-laning of the Karamana - Kaliyikkavila road, the expansion of the International Airport, the Trivandrum MRTS, city road development and, of course, the massive Vizhinjam deep water port project hardly find a mention, if at all.
For example, even as the honorable V. S. Shivakumar proclaims in typical fashion that land acquisition for Phase I of the much delayed project has "been completed", the long suffering users of the road are left wondering how this can be true when all that has happened is that designated committee has arrived at a final estimate of land prices to be paid.Even more curious, there's no evident allocation for acquiring the land in the budget, which will cost upwards of Rs 100-150 Crores for the first Phase alone. Yes, a few Lakhs have been munificently granted but as a friend of mine put it eloquently and in not-so-parliamentary language, that will not even suffice to set up a common-or-garden-variety tea-shop, far less an urban development project for this scale!
Last year, the Government "sanctioned" a number of projects for the development of the Capital city but apparently not even a single paisa has been set apart for any of them. But when we read the fine print, it becomes evident that all they sanctioned were "feasibility studies", which doesn't mean anything at all. I just hope that funds at least for these studies have been provided in the Budget, because such studies sometimes lead to outcomes, even if a decade or more later (when they are already well out of date, like the soon-to-be-concluded Trivandrum City Road Improvement Project Phase I). On that subject, there's a lot of talk about new roads, ring roads, square roads and triangular ones, but not a single Rupee in sight to fund all that gab.
Creative Accounting
Most importantly, our brilliant Finance Minister has quietly put in motion one of the most subtle mechanisms to fertilize some projects and to singe the roots of others. Instead of announcing specific allocations for each major project, as has been the case in the past, he has created a "common infrastructure project fund", with an allocation of Rs 846 Crores for FY 2013, which will provide funds for Vizhinjam,  Trivandrum and Kozhikode MRTS,National Games projects, Kannur Airport and "mobility" hubs (read bus stands!). This way, he can play to multiple audiences in very vague terms. For example, he can say that Rs 800 Crores out of the 846 have been allocated to Vizhinjam when soap-boxing in Trivandrum and then go to Calicut and claim that 700 of those same Crores have been allocated to the MRTS there. The truth is that he won't be quite fibbing. Really! That's because the fund can be expended on a first-come-first-served basis. So a project that's progressing on track can seek as much of the fund as possible, while one that is delayed may get nothing. It's unclear if there's a "catch-up" provision, by which the delayed project can recoup the funds that missed whenever it gets going, but I assume not. This would defeat the purpose of a revolving fund facility. It's also interesting that the Ernakulam MRTS, the darling of the CM, seems to have been left of the pack of projects snapping at each others' heels. If it is also part of the pool, I can imagine that the odds are stacked against the likes of Vizhinjam and the Trivandrum MRTS which have no political sponsors in the State Cabinet. This may be a key reason for the attempt to convert Vizhinjam from its Landlord model of development to a PPP, so that the resulting delay of at least 2 years would take it out of the reckoning for funds till the end of the tenure of this Government (if it ever makes it that far!). Fortunately, that attempt was thwarted by the timely action of Dr Tharoor, and let's hope that  Vizhinjam will tap heavily into the "fund" when the EPC tender is handed out later this year.
This is not the only instance of "creative accounting" in the Budget. There are a few cases where the same funds have been allotted year after year, mostly because it's evident that the beneficiary agencies are incapable of utilizing them. And Finance Ministers from both sides of the ideological divide have used this tactic many a time. For example, when there was much ado about the neglect of Trivandrum in the Budget, the Finance Minister graciously opened his purse strings to allot Rs 12 Crores for the Attukal Township project and placate the adjutant resident diety of the city. Of course, he knows full well that since the implementing agencies are the likes of the Trivandrum Corporation and TRIDA, whose magnificent track-record of project implementation will sure make him confident that not even a single Paisa would be used and he can make the same munificent offering next year as well.
Let's GetReal...and Smart
It would be folly to imagine that Trivandrum would ever be showered with funds, both because the Capital is short of political patrons and because the State Budget is very much a smoke-and-mirrors act due to a genuine resource crunch. More than 20% of the Government's revenues are eaten up by servicing its mountain of debt, a very large portion is consumed in pay and benefits for the army of Government employees, past and present, of whom most Chief Ministers live in terror. There's not much to allocate for development projects, major or minor, and Trivandrum is not getting much of that limited pie. Of course, there is money to splurge on the odd white elephanhant (Rs 50 Crores for the clearly infeasible and unnecessary bullet train) or the Ernakulam Metro, for which the Government is forking out an extra Rs 300 Crores this year alone.
What we can hope for and what Mani saar should have done is to allocate resources smartly. In a logical world, a good starting point would be to create a simple two dimensional matrix for projects - with Project Importance on one axis and the Stage of Development of the project on the other. 
For example, if two projects are at the same stage of development, the more strategic one will get first priority. It's unlikely that two projects will have the same strategic importance (there's only one Vizhinjam!) but if that does happen, the one which is under construction should get more priority than one which is still on paper. Of course, both importance and progress should be objectively evaluated and not left to the purely subjective opinion of a politician or a bureaucrat. For example, one could look at the economic  and social impact of each project to assign them an importance score. A project like Vizhinjam which has a national impact (by reducing the cost of logistics for exporters and importers across the country) will have greater significance than a project with a more regional impact like an airport or a city-centric MRTS. The state of progress of a project is more easily determined in a objective manner and the rationale behind the use of this parameter is to that projects that are under construction need more support than one that is on paper. This means that money should be prioritized for the land acquisition of the Karamana-Kaliyikkavila highway than for the bullet train. However, sufficient safeguards have to be built in to ensure that a particular project is not victimized for extraneous delays or that one is not soft-pedaled for the benefit of another. Moreover it may make even more sense to have separateseparate funds for feasibility studies and land acquisition, which are based purely on the importance of each project. Most of all, all of these decisions must be taken in a transparent manner by ensuring that all relevant data is published on as close to a real time basis as possible.
time ata.ty s moreof deciuiltyff.more jects that of thr
  
Rather than make blind allocations, many of which will go unutilized because of the ineptitude of the implementing agencies, changes have to made to such agencies to ensure that allocated resources are used as efficiently as possible. For example, a key allocation to be made in the next Budget is sufficient funds to create a Trivandrum Metropolitan Development Authority (TMDA) in the place of the notoriously incapable TRIDA and to give the powers and resources needed to implement major projects like TCRIP Phase II and the MRTS. TMDA will be an effective vehicle to utilize funds from JNNURM II which is set to roll out shortly. The failure of the Trivandrum Corporation to effectively utilize funds from JNNURM I is a story of near-criminal negligence and waste. The effective utilization of Central Funds can help the State Budget go a little further. The meagre funds available with the State can be better allocated for tasks that only the Government can perform or which the Government can perform more effectively than a private actor, such as land acquisition, entitlements and development involving public land and public right of ways.There is very little sense in public agencies trying to compete in sectors where private capital is far more efficient, such as real estate development, air transportation and retail. Instead, it should focus on core infrastructure development - roads, railways, ports, power, water and waste management. Operations can be outsourced to more efficient, experienced private entities in return for a revenue share.

The landlord model followed at Vizhinjam is a great solution for other core infrastructure projects, combining the efficiency of Public Private Partnerships and the ability to raise funds from the capital markets, with the pragmatic ability to have Government support to backstop project debt. The Special Purpose Vehicle will allow the recruitment of the sort of talent needed to manage specialized, complex and often large projects, something which is well nigh impossible within the labyrinth of public services recruitment and pay structures.

Keeping all of this in mind, I would propose that we take a time hop back before the Budget and slip the following into Mani Saar's briefcase. 
  • Rs 100 Crores for the development of a integrated centralized waste management plant for Trivandrum
  • Rs 300 Crores for the Vizhinjam project - to meet costs of the remaining land acquisition and as the equity component for the mobilization payment of approximately Rs 400 Crores for the EPC contractor (VISL is raising approximately Rs 1900 Crores of debt via loans and bonds)
  • Rs 100 Crores for Phase I land acquisition for the Karamana-Kaliyikkavila Road 
  • Rs 50 Crores for the acquisition of 19 acres of land for the expansion of the International Airport 
  • Rs 50 Crores for the acquisition of land for Phases I and II of Route 1 of the MRTS 
  • Rs 10 Crores for a feasibility study for a full network for the MRTS 
  • Rs 10 Crores for establishing the TMDA
It all seems to stack up to a lot - about Rs 620 Crores - but it's actually only a tiny fraction(3.5%)of the State's Rs 17,000 Crore plan outlay or the Rs 10,000 Crores that Kerala paid in debt service in 2012.It's 0.5% of what this same Cabinet wants to spend on bullet trains that will carry just 45,000 wealthy people a day (if ever those elusive 45,000 can be found!) or just twice what the Cabinet just approved for the Ernakulam MRTS project alone.

These are the sort of figures that drive in the sheer unfairness of the deal that the State Capital has been receiving when other States pamper their capitals with infrastructure projects galore and when Trivandrum accounts for as much as 11-12% of the Gross State Domestic Product.

Trivandrum district accounts for 8 MLAs of the Indian National Congress, which is supposedly the main constituent of the ruling Front with 39 MLAs in all. That's almost as many MLAs as all of Mani Saar's multi-alphabetic conglomerate and nearly half as many as the Muslim League. Yet the people who elected these 8 worthies, who include such senior leaders as K Muraleedharan and G Karthikeyan among the ranks, have to make do with scraps at the Budget table. When will these elected supposed-representatives wake up and ask for our fair share??
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Surf's Up in Trivandrum - with Jonty Rhodes!

May 4, 2013, 10:25 am
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You might expect the world's best fielder to over step on a cricket ground to be wearing whites or colors, on verdant grass, while showing his expertise in sports. Well no! Jonty Rhodes was clad in a black wet suit as he hot-dogged the surf at the beautiful Kovalam beach. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, not Malibu or Bondi but our good old Kovalam. The beach which started international tourism in Kerala, before anyone even heard of the backwaters, has kick-started a new sport - surfing - in our State. The Surfing Federation of India chose Kovala for India's first surfing and stand-up paddling competition.


Photo Courtesy: Madhyamam

Image Courtesy: Kerala Kaumudi

COWABUNGA!
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Vizhinjam Unveiled!

May 30, 2013, 11:04 pm
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Here's what India's deepest port and first world-class container transshipment port will look like.

The excerpts below are from the new master plan, created by AECOM - based on inputs supplied by Dr. Tharoor back in September, based on a crowd-sourcing exercise in which I was fortunate enough to be part of. 

I will follow up with detailed comments shortly. In the meantime, feast your eyes on the first ever port in India capable of handling the gargantuan Triple-E class container ships.

(Click on the images for their bigger versions)

Overall Master Plan (All 3 Phases)


Phase I


Phase II


Phase III


Stay tuned! 

(Read a few more posts, while you wait.....!) :)

Or check out how the world's biggest ship is getting built, Vizhinjam can handle it and more.....



 

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Suggestions Anyone? - Trivandrum's New Master Plan

June 3, 2013, 12:10 am
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As many of you may already be aware of, the new draft Master Plan for Trivandrum is ready - after a gap of over a quarter of a century, the one in force today dates back from 1984 or so! The plan has been published on the website of the Trivandrum Corporation, for the general public - you and me - to review and submit our suggestions. A word of caution, the hefty 24 MB document has nearly 400 pages, so it may take some time to go through it!

The Corporation and the Town Planning Department, which authored the draft, recently also conducted a seminar to provide a venue for suggestions to be aired.

Together with a number of like-minded friends, I have compiled a list of inputs to improve the draft and make it into a true vision-setting and operational document that can help set Trivandrum on the course to be a world-class city rivaling Singapore - the best benchmark for us - within a decade. 

The document is below, for your review.


Here are some of the salient points in the document for a quick review.

  • The current draft confines its recommendations and plans to the Trivandrum Corporation area in most part. Even after its recent expansion, the Corporation forms but one part of the larger Trivandrum Metropolitan Region which encompasses a significant portion of the Trivandrum District
  • Key developments such as Technocity – which will see the development of over 2 Crore sq.ft. of commercial space, employee over 100,000 IT professionals, involve an investment in excess of Rs 10,000 Crores and make very significant contributions to the economy of the district and State – is located outside the current geographical scope of the master plan as are areas such as Nedumangad which host strategic institutions such as the IISER and IIST as well as the Balaramapuram-Neyyatinkara axis which is a nearly continuous, high density stretch of urbanization which extends South from the Corporation area till the border with Tamil Nadu
  • Therefore, it is recommended that the scope of the master plan be extended till Attingal in the North, Nedumangad and the foothills of the Western Ghats in the East and till Neyyatinkara/Parassala in the South, and encompassing all the areas, already urbanized or otherwise, between the border of the Corporation and these peripheral urban centers
  • As mentioned above, a formal Trivandrum Metropolitan Area (TMA) has to be established by due process by the State Government. The master plan must act as both define this area and set the direction for development within it.
  • ·  In terms of providing increased density – over and above KMBR, it is best that this be focused in relation to transportation availability and economic activity.

  •   Increasing density in a purely concentric fashion will ignore the practical issues, such as the paucity of wide roads even within many parts of the core urban area that are necessary to support high density or the fact that focusing density around economic hub encourages the Work-Live-Play lifestyle paradigmwhich helps to minimize commuting (and the consequent vehicular use and pollution) by co-locating all the aspects of life

  • ·   It is recommended that density incentives be provided to areas located along primary transportation axes such as the NH-66 (Attingal to Vizhinjam), old NH-66 (between Kazhakkoottam and Kaliyikkavila), M.C. Road and other 4/6 lane roads within the metro regions, as well as along the proposed route of the mass transit system (not just the current alignment but along the entire network as proposed in Section 3). The latter promotes Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) and will help improve the viability and effectiveness of the MRTS network. These density incentives may be up to 1.5-2 times the FAR prescribed in KMBR for each use but must be accompanied by stringent parking requirements.

  • ·  The following new ring roads need to be laid out:

o First Outer Ring Road: Kaniyapuram-Vembayam-Karakulam-Vilappilsala-Balaramapuram-Vizhinjam
o Second Outer Ring Road: Attingal – Nedumangad-Malyinkeezhu-Neyyatinkara

  •  A single mass transit route will not suffice for a metro area the size of Trivandrum with well over 700,000 daily trips.
  • The master plan must incorporate a comprehensive mass transit network that serves the entire metro area.
  • This will be based around a multi-route mass transit system (viz the monorail) but also incorporate other modes of transport such as commuter rail, water transport and buses.
  • The monorail system must be quickly expanded with at least the following two additional routes:
    • Route 2: Kazhakkoottam – Aakulam – Airport (Chackai) – Pettah – Palayam – Vellayambalam – Peroorkada – Nedumangad (It could terminate at Peroorkada in Phase I).
    • Route 3: Vizhinjam – Kovalam – Eanchakkal – Airport – Kochuveli – Veli – Aakulam – KIMS - Medical College – Pattom – Kowdiar – Peroorkada – Civil Station– Manathala – Vembayam.


  • An integrated water supply system to cover the entire metro area has to be established. This needs to be immediately rolled out to cover the newly added areas of the corporation but also to the outlying areas of the metro areas, with new systems in areas currently not covered and by linking together existing stand-alone systems. The current 300 MLD capacity of the city’s water system has to be progressively increased to 500-600 MLD within the next 5 years. This will involve setting up additional processing capacity and also tapping new water sources such as the Neyyar and Peppara dams.
  • Considering even a water return volume of 50%, the city will need at least 250 MLD of sewage processing capacity in a few years, with the current STP at Muttathara having a capacity of only 107 MLD. A second STP of 150 MLD capacity (two phases of 100 and 50 MLD) is therefore proposed within the Veli-Kazhakkottam Industrial Estate.
  • In the next 10-15 years, power consumption in the metro area is likely to reach the 2500 Kwh/person/year level seen as a global average (and already in emerging markets such as China). This will necessitate about 1000 MW of generation capacity to meet the needs of the metro area and very likely much more if we take the increasing scale of commercial and industrial activities into account. A gas turbine power plant, fueled by natural gas from an LNG import terminal built at Vizhinjam will be the ideal choice to meet this need. The power plant can be developed in two phases of 1000 MW each and the excess power exported to the rest of Kerala/India.
  • Vizhinjam is the best-suited port in India for LNG import because of its proximity to gas sources such as Australia, Indonesia, East Africa, the US and Russia, as well as its deep draft. An LNG terminal at Vizhinjam can be leveraged for a metro area wide gas distribution network as well as conversion of vehicles to cleaner CNG, starting with government and public transport vehicles.
  • The availability of gas will also promote the development of micro-grids which are localized, interconnected loads such as buildings within a campus that share power generation and chilling capacity. This arrangement is very cost-effective, efficient and resilient (in case of grid failure).
  • Economic development - salient projects recommended include an international convention and trade center (under the landlord model of development), world-class logistics facility for Vizhinjam, Aerospace manufacturing cluster, Knowledge City and a strategic land bank for major economic development projects.
  • A key requirement to  implement the plan is a new agency, the Trivandrum Metropolitan Development Authority (TMDA) which should have the following powers over the entire metro area which must be formalized:
    • Issue all building permits and statutory clearances using a unified code for the entire metro area as per the guidelines of the master plan, KMBR, National Building Code etc
    •  Plan, finance and develop all public infrastructure under the master plan that does not fall into the mandate of existing agencies such as VISL, AAI, KWA, Indian Railways etc
    • Plan, finance and develop economic development projects, where not already under a specific agency. Even if under a specific agency, like the department of tourism (in the case of the convention center), TMDA can still be the financing and executing agency
    • Act as the landlord/project sponsor for PPP development projects and own the land and/or facilities and to collect revenues
    • Raise funds for development projects by the issue of bonds, raising debt from development finance institutions (World Bank, ADB, JICA et c) and from commercial lenders and by levying fees/taxes.
    • Periodically update the master plan (minor revisions once every two years, major updates every five years). and act as it custodian.
  • The TMDA must have a specialized economic development wing, modeled along the lines of the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) that creates strategic visions and plans, formulates project proposals, raises funding, oversee project execution and, promotes and facilitates private investment.
  • With the massive volume of transportation infrastructure development planned in the next 10 years and the ever-growing transportation volumes in the metro area, a dedicated agency is called for to integrate the development and operation of all modes of transportation. This will be the Trivandrum Metropolitan Transportation Authority (TMTA). 


As I mentioned in the beginning, these are but a select few of the points in the document. The Town Planning department is accepting suggestions till June 6, and I will make sure that the cumulative set of inputs makes it to the right decision makers and is given due consideration, if all of you could chip in with your points by June 4 via email or the comments facility here.

Remember, each of us has a different perspective on our beloved city and a different set of experiences and backgrounds, so we may each have at least one more point to add. More the merrier, so don't hesitate, the next time a chance like this comes along may be in 2038 (let's hope it comes a lot sooner than that!).

Thanks in advance, folks!
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Trivandrum Master Plan - Final version of Inputs

June 28, 2013, 11:20 pm
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Over 400 of you went through the draft set of inputs uploaded a few weeks ago and many of you sent me additional points either via comments or via email, thank you very much for taking the time off to think about the subject and to revert with your own inputs. I'd also like to thank my band of co-contributors who drew on their experience from fields as diverse as landscape engineering, software architecture and marine engineering to come up with highly detailed inputs.

All your inputs were compiled and have been sent across to the powers-that-be for their consideration. Apologies for the delay in uploading the final version, as I was on a two-week long business trip that spanned six countries including India. That's a separate story altogether, but I am hoping that some good news for Trivandrum may come out of it in the next few weeks and months.

Stay tuned!


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Stadium Spectacular!!

July 7, 2013, 12:14 pm
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Here's a newly released video of the stunning Trivandrum International Stadium, being built at Karyavattom, just about 1 Km from Technopark Phase I. India's most advanced stadium is capable of hosting international cricket and football matches, confirming to both ICC and FIFA requirements.

Beyond the 50,000-seater stadium itself, the complex also includes convention facilities, a world-class indoor sports center and club and a unique shopping mall built within the structure of the stadium.

Kerala's first purpose-built international-standard cricket stadium is also India's first stadium built on a fully Public Private Partnership model.

I am especially proud of this wonderful addition to our city as I had the opportunity to play a small role in the conceptualization of this project together with a small group of friends, back in 2011.

Sit back and enjoy the world-class stadium and its amenities that include restaurants with stunning match views and plush corporate boxes.



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Coming to Facebook!

July 20, 2013, 10:17 am
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As many of you know, I have been using Zuckerberg's all encompassing, ever-maddening creation to share posts on this blog for quite some time now. The importance of the social media universe has become hard to ignore when pretty much everyone I know and their dog are on Facebook and/or Twitter.

Trivandrum's projects have always suffered from a paucity, if not a complete lack, of promotion. Even the citizens of Kerala's capital have known very little about massive developments like Technopark, Technocity and the Vizhinjam deep-water port, even as they are making sweeping changes to our city and to the State, generating tens of thousands of jobs and thousands of Crores of economic activity.

Most of what is heard about these projects and others like the NH-66 expansion project and the MRTS is in the "popular" press, most of which is either negative in nature or of such abysmal reporting standards that it's best to pass up on.

However, now private citizens are taking the initiative to create Facebook pages for some of these key projects so that people can visit them to seek more information and to understand more about what they should be fighting for.

Here are a few to visit and Like!





Please go ahead and.....

 










Thanks!!
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Don't Play with Fire!

August 17, 2013, 6:24 pm
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The post discusses serious shortfalls in the fire & rescue services in Trivandrum where inadequate equipment and facilities put our city at risk. The bright side is that these can be addressed quickly to build a world-class rescue service via internally generated funds, if the right decisions are taken today.

A string of calamities, be it the devastating floods in Central Kerala or the explosion that sank the INS Sindhurakshak in Mumbai, has grabbed media attention in recent weeks. This is usually the only time when most of us give any thought about what could go terribly wrong around us. The next thought of course is how prepared are we to meet such eventualities. So perhaps this is an opportune juncture for us to deviate a little from the usual development discussions and take a look around Trivandrum and cast a critical eye on our disaster preparedness.

As a city of over 2 Million people, that's home to a whole host of strategic facilities that include India's most important space facility and the country's biggest business park, and which will soon add India's most advanced port to that repertoire, Trivandrum needs to pay a lot of attention to its preparedness to meet disasters, big and small. The list of potential emergencies is scarily long but let's examine one of the most common. 

Prometheus' gift to Man is a good start as any.

Trivandrum already has well over a hundred high-rise buildings, mostly residential, which are home to tens of thousands of people. Hundreds of new buildings are either under construction and will be built over the next few years as the demand for residential units keeps on growing, driven by the rapidly expanding economy of the State Capital. The city hosts massive commercial/industrial facilities including ISRO's sprawling facilities across the city, Technopark, dozens of R&D and educational institutions, industrial parks and multiple transportation hubs. It also has multiple military and paramilitary bases, not to mention the more common fire hazards like fuel storage facilities and filling stations. You'd imagine that the consequent dire need for fire-fighting and rescue infrastructure would be a top priority for the Government.

You'd be completely wrong! The Kerala Fire & Rescue Services (KFRS) is woefully under-manned and under-equipped. For example, there are probably less than 25 operation fire engines to cater to the Trivandrum metro region and a shortage of nearly 200 personnel  in the Trivandrum and Kollam districts alone. The city has just a single rescue tender which carries rescue equipment such as chain-saws and metal-cutters, which proves dangerously inadequate when the KFRS is called out as many 68 times on a rainy day! Most of the fire engines in the State are old and nearing the end of their operational life time, if not already beyond their scrap-by dates. By comparison, Cambridge, Massachusetts has 14 state-of-the-art fire appliances (the technical term for fire engines) and 8 fire stations for a population just over 100,000 people. To achieve a similar level of service, Trivandrum would need over 200 fire appliances!! Well, that might be a slight ask, but let's be pragmatic...

Reaching for the Sky

Among Cambridge's fire & rescue fleet are 4 giant ladder trucks, which are equipped with telescopic ladders that reach heights of over 100 feet (10 floors) to rescue trapped people and to spray water and foam on fires from above.

Ladder Truck 1
Photo Courtesy: Cambridge Fire Department

Trivandrum very likely has more high-rise buildings (10 floors or over) than the entire Boston metro area, which has mostly low and mid-rise buildings, except for in the Central Business District in the heart of the city itself. How many ladder trucks do we have? At the last count, zilch! In the past, the city's fire units had two ladder/aerial platform trucks, but both have been dysfunctional for quite a while now and plans to buy a new one seem to have made no headway.

The type of appliance that Trivandrum desperately needs is a hydraulic platform truck. Various models can reach heights of  32 - 112 meters, or 10 to 30 floors.

Hydraulic Platform Truck
Image Courtesy: London Fire Brigade

Currently, the manual ladders available with the KFRS can reach only up to the third floor or so. Tens of thousands of people live and work beyond the reach of these ladders. For example, most of Technopark's 7 Million SF of operating office space has 8-12 floors on average. Now one would think that such sophisticated gear can be seen only in the ranks of fire departments in the developed world. The truth is that sophisticated fire trucks of this type are in service across most major Indian cities outside Kerala. Even Tier 2 cities such as Madurai have these vital pieces of equipment in operation.

 Hydraulic Platform trucks in Bangalore
Image Courtesy: SSC
  
One of these costs on the order of Rs 5 - 10 Crores, depending on its reach. Cities like Mumbai and Chennai have over half a dozen of these, even Pune has four already. Trivandrum will need at least two, if not three. One needs to be stationed at the Central Fire Station, to respond to emergencies in the dozens of high-rises in and around the core city. The second unit needs to be deployed at the new fire station at Technopark, where in addition to the 10 Million SF of office space in the park, there are dozens of high rise apartment projects, most of them over 15 floors tall, sprouting up in a 5 Kilometer radius of the fire station. It make sense to have a long reach unit (which can reach up to 20 floors) such as a Bronto Skylift F 61 RPX deployed at this station. (Of course, the even bigger HLA series would be real eye-candy!) The same unit can also respond to emergenices at the ISRO complex and even at the International Airport.


Mumbai Fire Brigade's Bronto Skylift F 61
Image Courtesy: Team BHP.com
 The world record holder - the giant 112 m reach F 112
Image Courtesy: AutoWP.ru
The big Skylift trucks have often come under criticism in India because observers have been skeptical of their ability to navigate the narrow, crowded streets of many large Indian cities like Mumbai where skyscrapers are often accessed by side-roads. However, Trivandrum has wider and better roads than most Tier 2 cities and at least a couple of "metros" I know of. Indeed these trucks easily negotiate the winding streets of many historic European and American cities. 
Paying for these monsters will not be hard to digest for our State Government, but there are several pragmatic sources of funding that can be tapped. Every year, at least 2 Million SF (0.2 Crore SF) of high-rise residential buildings are built in Trivandrum. Mandating a one-time cess of Rs 10/SF on all buildings of at least 10 floors will yield Rs 2 Crores per year, a Rs 50/SF cess will yield Rs 10 Crores/year! Even this would be negligible in comparison to the average Rs 3500/SF price of high-rise apartments in the market. To make sure that the cost of the life-saving equipment is not borne only by the residents of new buildings, an equivalent charge can be retrospectively applied over, say, a 10 year period, to older buildings via the annual building tax. Technopark alone adds about 1-2 Million SF of office space each year, a similar one-time charge can fund the acquisition of a F 61 RPX in just the first year or two. Funds raised through these levies can be used thereafter to buy additional fire trucks (the ladder trucks are usually supported by one or two pump/water trucks) as well as to pay for the operating costs of the units. While this mode of funding is not the most ideal from the principle of distributive justice, it's the most pragmatic by matching the cost of providing an essential service to the most immediate beneficiaries of that service. It is also rather straightforward to collect and will make sure that the funds are not lost in the maddening tangle of budgetary red tape (which is doubly applicable to anything associated with the State Capital!).
Special Units 
KFRS has one rescue tender in Trivandrum which, as far as I can recall, also has some limited capability to deal with Hazardous Materials (Hazmat) emergencies. But one unit is far too inadequate to deal with emergencies which range from road accidents, fallen trees, collapsed buildings, oil and chemical spills, gas leaks and so on. A second unit should be available at the Technopark fire station. Rescue tenders carry all sorts of equipment including chain saws, hydraulic and gas cutters, lift bags, boats, breathing equipment and so. Trucks that are equipped with their own hydraulic cranes will prove extra useful in scenarios such as road accidents where vehicles have turned turtle or fallen down off the road. We have become used to scenes of rental cranes being called in when school vans or buses fall into canals. This often takes a lot of time, when mere minutes could make the difference between rescue and a watery grave.


Heavy rescue vehicle with an 8-ton crane
Image Courtesy: Chicagofire.com

A separate Hazmat response unit also needs to be stationed at Technopark or the Chackai Fire Station to deal with possible emergencies at the ISRO complex, the industrial complexes in Veli, Kazhakkoottam and Thonnakkal and the International Airport. 


 Hazmat Response Unit
Image Courtesy: Wikipedia.com 
A third location that will need both a rescue tender and a Hazmat unit will be the Vizhinjam deep-water port, when it becomes operational in 2017 or so and starts handling hundreds of thousands of containers that may contain any sort of cargo and also hosts Navy and Coast Guard facilities. The port's fire station will also need its own hydraulic platform truck and several standard fire tenders, not to mention one or more tugs with fire-fighting capability. While the port will pick up most of the cost of the facility, KFRS can bear the rest in exchange for making the units available to respond to emergencies in the vicinity, including densely populated areas like Balaramapuram and Neyyatinkara.

The KFRS also needs to have at least two modern wreckers - heavy duty tow trucks, which can also double as cranes. These are mostly used to respond to vehicular accidents. I believe a venerable tow truck is still in service with the KFRS in Trivandrum but new, more capable vehicles are needed.


Heavy-duty Tow Truck
Image Courtesy: Tow411.com

Since we are typing out a wish list of Santa, here's one more line item. Not many of us know that the prevailing building codes in Kerala, and indeed most of India, call forbuildings over a certain height (approximately 23 floors) to have mandatory helipads on their roofs, apparently for fire rescue helicopters to land in the eventuality of a major blaze. The catch is of course that there are no fire rescue helicopters anywhere in India! Air Force and Navy helicopters can be called in wherever they are available, mostly in cities where a military air base is nearby. While a chopper is a very expensive toy, it does make a lot of sense to have one which can be shared by the police and the fire & rescue service. It's very likely that the craft would be overwhelmingly used by the former, mostly for surveillance purposes but would still be available to respond in minutes should a high-rise inferno break out.

On the subject of things that fly, is the Trivandrum International Airport fairing any better in terms of its fire and rescue capability. On a bright note, the answer is yes. The State Capital's airport was one of the first in the country to deploy the state-of-the-art Rosenbauer Panther Airport Rescue and Fire Fighting (ARFF) vehicle, six of which are on duty to respond at lightning speed to any emergency in the busy airport.

 Rosenbauer Panther 6 X 6 ARFF
Image Courtesy: SixAppealWheel.com

More Fire Stations 

While on the subject of new fire stations, it may make a lot of sense to rethink the current strategy of having a few fire stations, some with a large number of tenders (4 or more in the case of the Central and Chackai locations), each serving large areas. Trivandrum only has 6 or so fire stations - including Central, Chackai, VSSC, Technopark, Vizhinjam, Nedumangad, Neyyatinkara and Attingal.This means that the average response time to reach an incident is often 10-15 minutes or more, especially during rush hour. In contrast, the strategy in the US is to have a large number of fire houses, each with 1 to 3 fire appliances, distributed across the urban area. Again, using Cambridge as an example, there are 8 fire houses within an 18.5 Sq. km area which is miniscule when compared to the 400 Sq. km area of the Trivandrum metropolitan area. Ideally, there should be one fire house, with 1 to 3 fire engines located at distances of 4 - 6 Km from each other, enabling response times of 5 - 10 minutes to any emergency. Serious situations requiring the response by a hydraulic platform truck or a heavy rescue tender can be handled from a main fire station. Eventually, a hydraulic platform truck should be stationed in every fire house in a high-rise neighborhood. Of course, finding the land for the new fire stations will not be easy but by intelligently existing Government-owned premises such as offices, hospitals, police stations and schools, this can be achieved without the need for major land acquisition. This has to be accompanied by the roll-out of automatic fire alarm systems and the establishment of fire hydrants across the water network.

The totaloutlay for modernizing the fire & rescue force in the city will work out to about Rs 50 Crores over the next 2 to 3 years, including the acquisition of the new equipment and the construction of new facilities.Daunting as this figure sounds, it pales in comparison with some of the ongoing and planned infrastructure investments in the State (no, I am not going to refer to that Rs 1,50,000 Crore bullet train yet again....wait, I just did! Oh well..) and it can be mostly funded from direct sources as described previously. The cost of not making these judicious decisions will be measured in lives, and that's not something that can be conveniently fitted into a cost-benefit analysis on an Excel sheet.

Well, the idea for this post came out of my fixation with big, red fire engines barreling down the road with their flashing lights and wailing sirens (I used to tag them on my bike and Towering Inferno and Backdraft are two of my favorite movies!). However, this is a very real issue that a growing city needs to deal with sooner rather than too late and some smart decisions made today could avert a tragedy which is usually only a question of when, not if.
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Who's Against the Vizhinjam Project?

August 26, 2013, 9:11 am
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Check out a very interesting and comprehensive video about the Vizhinjam deep-water port project, focusing on the challenges faced by the megaproject, including a chronically procrastinating State Government and various vested interests, ranging from a small number of local resort owners to port operators, near and far. 

It also includes interviews of some of the project's most vocal proponents including prominent political journalist, Elias John, and of local people who voice their strong support for the project. Hats off to these simple folk who can see the truth that the high-and-might cannot, or choose not to.

Please take a look and share it as much as possible!

(The video is in Malayalam and in two parts).

Video Courtesy: Media One




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