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Europe and India: The Way Ahead for Transport

Editor — Mon, 29 Mar 2021 15:39:34 +0000

How European tech can integrate with India’s transport development

By Mangal Dev, Head of Hitachi Rail, India and South Asia region

For European and Italian firms there are good opportunities in the Indian transport sector: the Indian government is open to external specialist technology companies that would like to set up their complete value chain for global markets from India.

Why India? The country offers a myriad of opportunities not only in terms of skilled human resources, raw materials, and an ecosystem of start-ups and SMEs, but also a favorable environment when it comes to ease of doing business.

More importantly, India offers a market of 1.3 billion people.

The country’s goal is to become a 5 trillion dollar economy and that means it needs to greatly accelerate its infrastructure development.

It’s important to look at the ongoing transformation, policies and plans based on important budget allocations for transport infrastructure: railways, highways, and urban transport, waterways and airports.
Many Italian and European companies are already expanding in India, seizing the opportunities offered by the major infrastructure development currently underway.

So, how can cooperation between European technology integrators and companies ready to receive and adapt these technologies in countries with a large user base, such as India, be developed?

Companies driven by the Sustainable Development Goals have a long-term outlook and will find it easier to cooperate with each other, as the technological complementarity with a strong foundation will be equally important to consider.

Most of the time the challenge is posed by the need for change unless there is a strong desire, a willingness to innovate for efficiency and productivity for a bigger cause.

However, this ‘higher cause’ — one that is common for the organization, the community and the country — is seldom an ideal driver for such change. Therefore, the role of a change management facilitator has become quite important to help drive the meaning of the change for its economic, social and environmental value.

India is a vast country with a market that is to be viewed to have a favorable pyramid top, accessible to all foreign companies based on the solutions with features satisfying European market needs with a European cost base.

The middle layer is most crucial, it demands innovation with design frugality and is best attempted by local leadership and local talent, the success of which should be measured by a different yardstick, enabled by the impetus of its foreign parent. Addressing the middle layer will unlock the unorganized bottom layer of the pyramid as well but with complete flexibility and authority in the hands of the local management.

Could India become a model for the application of transport technologies which can be replicated in other SAARC areas?
If you succeed in India, it will be much easier to replicate that model in other SAARC regions. For example, what is successful in West Bengal can easily be replicated in Bangladesh, what is successful in Tamil Nadu is likely to be successful in Sri Lanka, and so on.

India will offer (large) scale volumes for SAARC countries, and the hub-and-spoke model will therefore create good cohesion between a specific region in India and its neighboring SAARC partner with ease of connectivity in the same time zone.

If being successful in India means technology exchange, can trainers be brought in to upgrade the country’s local workforce and develop their tech skills uniformly so that they’ll be on par with other developed nations?
With the industry 4.0 revolution driving digitalization, AI, ML and IoT, there will be a constant need to retrain human resources in their respective job functions.

This means that retraining and upgrading the Indian workforce’s skill sets calls for an effective, interactive educational environment and rotational job training.

However, it will take experienced trainers to assess the individuals and the best practices for a given situation, so it will be productive to work towards developing in-house training staff to ensure the consistency and scalability of the programs. Such programs should be implemented locally in India and perhaps even as a joint initiative between several like-minded companies.

India also has initiatives underway to generate ideas for reducing road traffic, such as a recent seminar organized by the Indian government, under the leadership of Prime Minister Modi on “Make in India”, in which all ministries, government agencies, public and state companies as well as private industry partners were brought together.

There, the goal of the workshop was initiated from the top, continued through government agencies, and then to the (local) executive bodies. In two days of workshops, divided into several working groups, healthy debates were held and a common consensus reached.

The road maps prepared by each of the working groups were then presented to the PM. Indian Railways also organized a brainstorming session with their employees, which resulted in some out-of-the-box ideas. These conclaves are absolutely necessary, but what is important are the final objectives and the total commitment with the involvement of all stakeholders.

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Transport and Poetry

Editor — Mon, 28 Sep 2020 06:55:15 +0000

Culture and Rail link Bangladesh and India through West Bengal

By Suroopa Chatterjee

When we talk of poetry in the Indian context, the foremost name that strikes a familiar chord is that of Rabindranath Tagore who donned many roles: painter, poet, philosopher, traveller, social reformer, educator. But few know that this polymath and Nobel laureate’s family had a deep relationship with railway connectivity.

Dwarkanath Tagore, grandfather of Rabindranath Tagore had diverse business interests in banking insurance, shipping, and trading goods like indigo, silk, sugar and coal. His interest in railways developed on his visit to England and, subsequent to his return, he understood the need for railway connectivity in collieries and offered to raise one third of the capital for setting railway lines between Calcutta to the Raniganj coalfields. Apart from the emotional connection railways bring, they have played an important part in joining nations and establishing trade routes between India and its neighbours for quite a long time. Within the spectrum of this Indian subcontinent, Bangladesh and West Bengal particularly have had a special and unique equation.

Joined by shared civilization, cultural similarity, social and economic ties, Bangladesh and West Bengal share a common love for linguistics, heritage, music, and literature. The Sunderbans, famed the world over for the Royal Bengal Tiger, is the largest mangrove delta, extending across both the nations and covering over 10,200 sq. kilometres.

Similarities aside, Bangladesh is India’s largest trading partner in the South Asian context. According to a report published earlier in the Hindustan Times, total Indian exports to Bangladesh for FYI 2018–19 was $9.21 billion and Bangladeshi imports to India were around $1.22 billion. The pursuit of India’s own regional interests largely depends on greater regional interdependence and connectivity with its immediate neighbours. China is playing a very big role in supporting infrastructure, modernization and developmental initiatives in India’s periphery through fibre optic or rail links.

China has been relentlessly offering Bangladesh duty free access to its products. In this light India is strengthening its approach: a multi-pronged strategy to enhance its business and trade partnerships with Bangladesh. In order to achieve this, India is facilitating seamless connectivity for the movement of Bangladeshi products to landlocked regions on the Indian side particularly north-east India. There is a major thrust to increase connectivity via inland water transport, sea ports, highways and railways allowing Bangladesh to access the Bhutan and Nepal markets in addition to those in India. Both Bangladesh and India are activating measures for the restoration of the pre-1965 rail and other connectivity links.

Even during the pandemic that shook the globe, the July 2020 decision by the Government of Bangladesh to resume border trade via West Bengal will soon set a positive pace for greater exports into India after a brief hiatus. Grant help has been given to Bangladesh from India for myriad infrastructure projects including construction of the Akhaura Agartala rail link. Another area of rail connectivity that got a major boost was India giving 10 broad gauge locomotives to its railway counterpart in Bangladesh as a grant which is a sign of continued cooperation and goodwill between the two neighbours. The West Bengal government proposed to continue trade through Gede in south Bengal’s Nadia district in July. According to Mr. Alapan Bandyopadhyay, State Home Secretary, this was safer and acceptable.

The month of July 2020 saw a lot of rail activities between the two countries as a parcel train containing chilies from the south-eastern state of Andhra Pradesh reached Bangladesh. A month prior, more than 100 freight trains carrying FMCG products, essential and finished items were ferried between the two regions. Another significant development was declared by Piyush Goyal, Minister of Commerce and Industry, on his twitter handle in July 2020: “From Bareilly to Bangladesh! 51 trucks exported from India to Bangladesh via Indian Railways. Railways is at the forefront to promote exports.” The Petrapole-Benapole Integrated Check post, which constitutes almost a third of Indo-Bangladesh bilateral trade (USD 8.7 billion), is now fully functional on both sides.

The special element that ties the two Bengals is undoubtedly the warm camaraderie and familiarity of language between the two regions. Passenger trains like the Maitree Express, which means “Friendship Express”, has been bringing the citizens of both sides even closer together since its inauguration in 2008. In 2017 a second train service connecting Kolkata with Khulna in Bangladesh, the Bandhan Express, was inaugurated.

Railways will continue to thrive, survive and revive business links between India and Bangladesh with growing infrastructure and improvement in services, a common focus from both sides. Railway service will provide additional impetus to trade by reducing time and cost of import export between the two countries reducing the rate from Rs 7,000/tonne to Rs 1500/tonne. Transportation time by train will reduce transport times from almost a fortnight (when done through Surface transport) to just a few hours.

Doubtless both passenger and commercial rail links will bring movement and forge more connections between India and its closest eastern neighbour. Tagore himself noted the changes wrought by rail in his famous poem Railway Station, penned in 1940: “On and on with repetitive movement / Eastwards, westwards, rapid as storms.”

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