Infrastructure
Need People with Commitment S N Subrahmanyan keeps his audience thinking with his words
M J Krishna Associate Editor
L
arsen & Toubro's SN Subrahmanyan perhaps would not qualify to serve with the government's Foreign Service. This is a man who seems to speak out the facts and call spades as such. When he spoke on the occasion of the 176th AGM of the Madras Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the audience was august, as were the special guests on stage. Excerpts from his talk and interaction at the event: Unlocking the complication of Infrastructure Infrastructure is really complicated. One such recent instance is the state-ofthe-art solid waste management facility that came up in the city of Thiruvananthapuram. Though the courts had judged in favour of the facility, protest from some people has stalled it for another 3-4 years!
would grow by 12 % and its GDP, 4.8 %. The country would reach 1.5 billion then, and a land mass one fourth the size of the US would hold four times the population of that country... with so much less underground wealth in the country, this is really not sustainable... Unless we do something about it, this story of growing Indian population and inadequate infrastructure would be talked about in various fora around the world... By 2030, it would take 1.2 trillion of infrastructure investment to meet even very basic demands in the country... 700900 million square meters of commercial and residential space is required; it is equivalent to two Mumba is every year! We require 2.5 million sq.meters of roads. The only way to go across the cities would be by underground metros, a network that can move 1 - 2 million every day. In the case of water supply, from 83 million liters per day a few years back, the
consumption has risen to 189 M liters today. Singapore shows the way The water tapped today from Malaysia would soon run out, but Singapore is prepared for it. Every road in Singapore has got large water storage facilities. Every building harvests rain water. In the water supply caverns, one can see humans walking comfortably; the facility is good enough to eat and live there inside the sewer. In India, funds are allocated for good sewer infrastructure, maybe the privatepublic partnership (PPP) would work in some places, but it is not sustainable… the government cannot shy away from its primary responsibility of providing for the huge demand... Car companies are rolling out over a million cars annually today, touching ten million when we consider two wheel-
We are like this only! This is a term that all of us have been used to... or does one want to say “we can be like that also?” Many other countries that have not been endowed with a wealth like ours, have thought, planned and driven themselves to do much better than what we are. China is a classic example when the country has gone fifty years ahead of India. Much smaller countries like Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia have also gone much ahead… small countries in the middle east are doing the same; oil is running out but they have built an infrastructure and they would be where they are for a long time to come... INDIA, 2030 By the year 2025, India's population
(From Right) S N Subrahmanyan, S Ramadorai, T T Srinivasaraghavan
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