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Networked Bharat

The warp and weft of India’s infrastructure-delivery fabric is being woven together at a hectic pace, overshadowing single-location, lumpy investments of yesteryears. And this decade and the next will see infrastructure companies and construction companies make the unexpected move from building large capex, location-based, standalone projects such as highways, bridges, power plants, ports and airports to linking up utilities delivery. The action has clearly shifted to a wave of investments in providing connectivity and delivering utilities to the masses.

Take the case of the Bharatmala Pariyojana. The earlier generation of highway projects focused on trunk roads. Bharatmala’s aim is to build connections to district headquarters, industrial and logistics hubs, and ports. In fact, of the 34,800 km of roads envisaged under phase 1 of the programme, only 10,000 km will be on trunk routes. The rest of the investment will be on connecting the ‘spokes’.

And while roads are the most obvious example of this new ‘network’ paradigm in Indian infrastructure, other programmes emphasise the point — water, electricity, fibre-connectivity, gas, regional airports, and EV charging stations.

The Ministry of Jal Shakti was formed by merging the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation, with the Ministry of Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation on May 31, 2019. And through Jal Shakti, the government has promised its biggest-ever delivery to the aam aadmi — 100 per cent piped-water to all households by 2024. Nal se Jal (rechristened Har Ghar Jal in Budget 2019-20) is a hugely ambitious programme. A NITI Aayog report last year pointed out that “three-fourths of the households in the country do not have drinking water at their premises”. Given that as per the census of 2011, there were around 23 crore households in the country, and assuming that this statistic has not changed at all, Nal se Jal will have to cover 19 crore households.

Towards the end of April 2018, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that the electrification of all 640,000 villages in India had been completed. Immediately thereafter was announced the scheme of electrifying all of India’s households, and the Saubhagya initiative got off the ground. According to saubhagya.gov.in, a government site which tracks household electrification, around 31.5 million households were still left to be electrified. Much of the target has since been achieved — a record of sorts.

The Bharat Net project, launched in 2011, is the national optical fibre network to provide connectivity to all 250,000 gram panchayats. Implementation is currently underway across most states in India.

Equally impactful, City Gas Distribution is set to transform the lives of millions of Indians. Starting from April 2020, and up to 2029, winners of the various GA (geographical area) bids have promised to deliver over 2 million piped gas connections per year, a total of 3,500 CNG stations across the country, and 58,000 km of pipelines. The latest round of bidding in city gas will result in close to 70 per cent of the population being covered by piped gas over the ensuing years.

As part of the government’s drive to accelerate adoption of electric vehicles and to create the necessary infrastructure, the ministry of power had issued guidelines and standards for charging stations in December 2018. The Department of Heavy Industry has invited proposals from urban local bodies, municipal corporations, PSUs (state/central) and public/private entities that are interested in developing EV charging infrastructure in different states and cities. The proposal’s eligibility covers cities that have million-plus population, according to the 2011 census.

Then there are the airport projects under the UDAN Regional Connectivity Scheme of the Ministry of Civil Aviation that seeks to operationalise 100 fresh remote and regional airports. The aim is to put air travel within the reach of those living outside large cities.

The benefits are obvious. There is a range of research that shows the huge economic benefits that accrue from simply enhancing connectivity between nodes in the grid, for example, when remote areas are provided easier connectivity (both physical and electronic) to core economic hubs. Transaction costs fall. Retailers can penetrate much deeper into rural India than they hitherto could. Conversely, companies, who would earlier not have invested in such areas because of the infrastructure problems, can now do so, thus creating jobs. Electricity connections open up a world of possibilities. And piped water in homes removes centuries of deprivation.

But the challenges in these ‘last mile’ connectivity projects are enormous as well. Nal se Jal will require extraordinary levels of handling by the centre, given that water is a state subject. Similar challenges exist in city gas projects where the cooperation of municipalities and state governments in areas such as land acquisition and approvals is absolutely critical.

In fact, the biggest obstacle to the new networked infrastructure model is the “right-of-way” they need, over and above the managerial challenge of daily operations with scattered and disaggregated labour forces.

And what about funding? Public finances are currently stressed. Institutional funding to networking infrastructure requires a completely different set of evaluation and servicing parameters.

These challenges are indeed daunting, but if Indian infrastructure has to deliver utilities to the end-user, it is a challenge that will have to be grappled with. After all, infrastructure is ultimately about enhancing the quality of life.—Authored by Vinayak Chatterjee, Chairman, Feedback Infra for Business Standard

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