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Archive for the ‘Infrastructure’ Category

The DAME Was Late

Posted by: Aadisht on: October 12, 2010

Swami A Aiyar’s latest column is about how the messes in the Commonwealth Games are the ones the government has made, while the few successes involved are the ones the private sector are involved in. This is a sentiment that I generally agree with, but it commits one key error when it talks about how [...]

Notes From a Delhi Weekend

Posted by: Aadisht on: October 11, 2010

Or, too long for tweets, too short for individual posts. This is an Amul Chocolate blogpost. Or perhaps Goldilocks. Whatever. To my great sadness, I fell sick on Saturday, and though my family had tickets to the athletics events at the Commonwealth Games, I wasn’t able to attend. I’m not sure when India’s hockey semifinal [...]

Notes From My Bombay Trip

Posted by: Aadisht on: June 21, 2010

My Jet Airways Citbank Card finally came of some use and I used miles accumulated since 2007 to get myself a return ticket to Bombay where I attended the NiTyaGu wedding. Regrettably, Airport Development Fees and Congestion Charges cannot be paid for by miles. When introducting Konnect, Jet Airways seems to have forgotten to make [...]

History Repeats Itself

Posted by: Aadisht on: April 23, 2010

The first time as labour, the second time as capital. This is interesting. Back in the 19th century, when Southern Pacific and Central Pacific were building transcontinental railroads in the USA, they used Chinese labourers when they hit California. Here’s a very Web 1.0 page on the subject. Precis-ing it madly, the interesting bits are: [...]

Customer Financed Projects

Posted by: Aadisht on: October 3, 2009

In F Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, the main characters are an American couple called the Divers who are Page 3 People in the 1920s. They live on a hillside Villa over the French Riviera, where they throw parties for American tourists and expats. Unfortunately up to the 1920s Riviera hotels were open only [...]

All India Radio

Posted by: Aadisht on: September 9, 2009

Samar Halarnkar is pissed off that Indian FM radio stations only play Bollywood songs and puerile PJs (a sentiment I share to some extent) and proposes a solution in the Hindustan Times – putting AIR on steroids. AIR has found fans like me — though let me confess that before I ‘discovered’ AIR, I was [...]

Incorporating Heritage

Posted by: Aadisht on: August 6, 2009

Neel has a blogpost which talks about IIT-D designed board games that incorporate elements from traditional Indian stories into their design. He also laments that most Indian design and architecture does very little to showcase heritage, and picks on malls, airports and railways stations as being the worst offenders. I had some scattered thoughts about this which [...]

The Chiranjeevi Metric for Success

Posted by: Aadisht on: June 19, 2009

I was reading the April 2008 issue of the Asian Institute of Transport Development’s Journal of Transport and Infrastructure yesterday. Yes, I am that far behind on my reading, and yes I do read journals on transport for fun. It was a special issue on Public-Private Partnerships, and had a paper on Hyderabad’s suburban rail [...]

Some Public Transport Links

Posted by: Aadisht on: June 4, 2009

First up, the Times of India has a report on the Lajpat Nagar station of the Delhi Metro facing problems. While the station itself is being built, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi is refusing to give the Delhi Metro Railway Corporation land for entry and exit points. If this situation is not resolved, then come [...]

In Pragati

Posted by: Aadisht on: June 4, 2008

I have an article on how finance is actually infrastructure and financial sector reforms out in this month’s edition of Pragati. The link to the article gives you an excerpt and you’ll have to download the PDF version (slightly less than 2 MB) to read the full thing. The article had a checkered history. I had almost [...]