The Centre will start identifying urban areas which can be transformed into “smart cities”, before the Budget, Union Urban Development Minister Venkaiah Naidu said here on Monday.

The government is currently holding consultations with all stakeholders including state governments, local bodies and those keen on developing smart cities.

“I have held consultation with my state counterparts and taken them into confidence. Now we are at the advance stage of finalising the contours of the smart cities and by November we expect the process to be completed…and expect to identify the cities before the Budget,” Naidu, who was in town today for the Ieema annual convention, told reporters.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has envisaged developing 100 smart cities by 2022. The Finance Ministry has allocated Rs 7,060 crore for developing these cities as well, which will replace the present flagship urban renewal scheme JNNURM.

“I am planning to complete the process of consultation and finalisation of the contours by end of November and take them to the Expenditure Finance Committee and then to Cabinet. Then from the beginning of the year, roll out will begin,” he said.

“We plan to have at least 2-3 smart cities in each state,” he said.

Emphasising the need for taking all the stakeholders on board, he said, “You have to take the states and urban local bodies into confidence. Then you need support from different sectors and you need finances, which need a lot of consultations. We have finalised PPP model for developing smart cities.”

Naidu further said there is an increased interest from other countries to participate in this project. “I have held consultations with a lot of foreign delegations who are interested in participating in this project. Japan is keen to cooperate to transform Varanasi into a smart city. Similarly, a former Singaporean Prime Minister has also met me and expressed interest in constructing a new capital for Andhra, which I want to make into a smart city,” he said.

He said he will visit cities like Oklahoma and Seoul to understand their models.

However, he noted that creating a smart city is not an easy task. “It is not easy to construct a smart city overnight without light and basic amenities. We need to prepare habitat with a smart leadership. Further, there is a need to provide facilities for transport, water, disposal of waste, traffic security management, education, entertainment and employment opportunities, among others. All these things will take time,” he said.

“In this entire process, having 24×7 power supply will be critical. A city cannot be smart if there is no power. Therefore, there is a need to create proper transmission and distribution system to ensure uninterrupted supply of electricity,” Naidu added.

Nearly 1 billion Yuan project comes to light after seven failed attempts over the past 50 years

China on Thursday opened a new highway that links what the government has described as Tibet’s “last isolated county” – located near the border with Arunachal Pradesh – with the rest of the country and will now provide all-weather access to the strategically-important region.

Chinese state media have hailed the opening of the highway to Medog – which lies close to the disputed eastern section of the border with India – as a technological breakthrough, with the project finally coming to fruition after seven failed attempts over the past fifty years.

China first started attempting to build the highway to Medog – a landlocked county in Tibet’s Nyingchi prefecture – in the 1960s, according to State media reports, in the aftermath of the 1962 war with India.

With Thursday’s opening of the road, every county in Tibet is now linked through the highway network, underlining the widening infrastructure gulf across the disputed border, even as India belatedly pushes forward an upgrading of border roads in more difficult terrain.

The official Xinhua News Agency on Thursday described Medog as “the last roadless county in China”. Before this week, Medog was the only one of China’s 2,100 counties to remain isolated from the highway network, according to State broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV).

What the project will do

State media reports have focused on the development benefits that the project would bring and have sought to play down the strategic dimensions. Local officials said the road’s opening will bring down commodity prices and widen access to healthcare.

The road will also provide access to the border county for nine months of the year. That the government was willing to spend as much as 950 million Yuan – or $ 155 million – on a 117-km highway, with ostensibly few economic returns expected, has underscored the project’s importance to State planners.

Local officials said prior to the opening of the highway, reaching Medog required traversing the treacherous Galung La and Doxong La mountains at an altitude of 4,000 metres. With frequent landslides, the road was often rendered impassable.

Now, the road will be accessible for “8 to 9 months per year, barring major natural disasters”, Ge Yutao, Communist Party head of the transportation department for the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), told Xinhua.

Work on the 117-km road began in 2009, a year after the project was given the green light by the State Council, or Cabinet.

Renewed attention on infrastructure projects

The opening of the road comes at a time when there has been renewed attention on infrastructure projects in border areas in India and China.

Last week, both countries signed a Border Defence Cooperation Agreement (BDCA) during Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Beijing, aimed at expanding confidence-building measures. The agreement calls for setting up channels of communication between military commands, increasing the number of border personnel meetings, and formalising rules such as no tailing of patrols, to built trust and avoid incidents.

The agreement does not specify or limit either country’s plans to boost infrastructure – an issue that, analysts say, has in the past triggered tensions along the disputed Line of Actual Control (LAC), most notably in April when a Chinese incursion sparked a three-week-long stand-off in Depsang, Ladakh.

Han Hua, a South Asia scholar at Peking University, suggested in a recent interview that the “basic reason” for the incident was “too much construction” along the border. The Chinese side, she acknowledged, did not have to build closer to the disputed LAC because their infrastructure, as well as more favourable terrain enabled quicker mobilisation.

“If we don’t have the overall collaboration of the military, policy-makers and decision-makers on both sides,” she said, “it will be difficult to avoid such incidents”.

‘India’s plans will not be limited’

The BDCA, Indian officials said, will not limit India’s plans to upgrade infrastructure. It recognises the principle of equal and mutual security, which allows either side to pursue its security in its own way. At the same time, officials say the BDCA will still help “regulate activity” along the border by opening up new channels of communication, even as the border continues to remain a matter of dispute.

On Thursday, Chinese Defence Ministry spokesperson Yang Yujun told a regular press conference that military personnel would hold “regular meetings” and “make joint efforts” to maintain peace in border areas, following the signing of the BDCA. The agreement, he said according to a Xinhua report, “summarised good practices and experiences on the management of differences in China-India border areas”.

Source-http://www.thehindu.com

 It is New Delhi and not states in the east or north-east that fear Chinese trade and investments along the corridor. This trade can only boost their economies. The opening of the Stilwell Road, built during World War II, is a case in point. Assam’s industry minister Pradyut Bordoloi and Arunachal Pradesh’s former governor J J Singh have been enthusiastic about opening the road to China-India trade. Unlike the Nathu La pass in Sikkim, the Stilwell Road is capable of handling 20-25 per cent of Sino-Indian bilateral trade. But a powerful defence-commerce ministry lobby has blocked it all these years.

China has modernised its part of the road and its companies are doing that in Myanmar now. Only 66 km of the road falls in India — so, if the Chinese army uses it to amass troops on the Indian border for a surprise offensive or dump their products in a trade war, they can do it even if India does not formally open the road. Also, trade with India via Arunachal Pradesh will immediately stop all claims of that region as “southern Tibet”.

Note how quickly China shed its reservations on Sikkim, after trade resumed through the Nathu La pass. JJ Singh, a former army chief, advocated an Indian presence on the road for pragmatic reasons, but that did not help with the mandarins in Delhi. So, an alternate route was chosen for the BCIM car rally in February-March: it started at Kolkata, passed through Bangladesh and India’s north-eastern states of Assam and Manipur, and ended in Kunming, Yunnan via west and north Myanmar.

Now, China wants the car rally route to be converted into the BCIM Friendship highway and turned into an economic corridor with industries, trading entrepots and tourism infrastructure developed around it. This is an excellent idea. Large parts of China, contiguous with south Asia, are landlocked. The Strait of Malacca is a choke point that China wants to bypass through overland trade through Myanmar, Bangladesh and the north-east. Beijing wants to transform BCIM into a live regional grouping to integrate the two most populous nations of the world and use the Bangladesh-Myanmar corridor to help Chindia draw south-east Asia into the world’s strongest future economic bloc. Beijing hopes that India sheds its fear of encirclement by China and creates a win-win situation for both countries in Asia, from south-east to west.

India, especially its eastern and north-eastern states, would stand to gain much more economically by higher trade and connectivity with China and the rest of Asia. On the other hand, there is no material gain if India acts as a pivot for American interests in south Asia.

A formal push for the BCIM during Manmohan Singh’s China visit may boost investments and help chief ministers or industry ministers in the east and north-east to showcase their states to Chinese investors. If the home ministry can waive its objections and agree to allow Chinese telecom majors like Huawei to invest in the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor or the Indian embassy in Beijing can rope in huge Chinese investments for Andhra Pradesh, the east and north-east should not be deprived because the region has a long border with China.

Source-http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com

New Delhi: Nearly seven months after finance minister P. Chidambaram proposed setting up a roads regulator to address challenges such as financial stress, construction risk and contract management issues, the roads ministry is close to finalizing the structure and role of the proposed regulator.

“We will get the cabinet approval for the roads regulator by December,” Vijay Chhibber, roads secretary, told reporters at a conference organized by industry lobby Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry.

The ministry of road transport and highways has proposed that the roads regulator have an adjudicatory role for contract dispute resolution, renegotiation of future contracts and enforcement of contractual obligations.

For issues related to renegotiation of existing contracts, tariff structuring and toll mechanisms, project entry and exit options and specific policy issues, the regulator is proposed to play an advisory role.

“Road ministry is working on these terms of reference and the constitution mechanism and organizational structure of the roads regulator is under finalization,” Chhibber said.

The roads ministry has set up a task force for looking into the framework of the authority. The ministry has proposed that the regulator be headed by a board with a chairperson and two members, to whom an executive wing with technical and secretariat support will report.

“Toll-paying users under the current architecture do not get a fair voice. We should have a third party whom users can approach if they are not being provided with the services promised in the contract,” said Chhibber. “Then we are struggling with (contract) renegotiations. A roads regulator will help address these issues.”

Economic affairs secretary Arvind Mayaram, speaking at the same conference, said independent regulators such as in the roads sector are necessary to avoid situations where private parties and government bodies are blaming each other for issues arising out of project implementation.

“Regulators must begin to do this. If there is a concession issue, if there is a problem about the economics of the project which can happen, then we very clearly look at the stress test. It should very clearly look at where culpability lies and some haircut needs to be put in place so that the moral hazard issue is properly answered,” he said.

The roads ministry saw a sharp decline in award of contracts for highways last year. Against a lowered target of 8,100km, only 1,116km of highway projects were awarded.

The ministry will ramp up award of road projects under the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) mode in the absence of interest from private players for build, operate, transfer projects, Chhibber said.

The ministry is looking to award 6,500km of road projects through the EPC mode in 2013-14, he added.

“The primary role of the proposed road regulator should be appropriate risk and reward allocation between government, developers, lender and especially the users,” said Parvesh Minocha, managing director of the transportation business at infrastructure consultancy Feedback Infra Pvt. Ltd. “If this is done and a proper structure is put in place to implement it then the downstream remedial roles like dispute resolution and failure handling will get significantly reduced.”