Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu’s second largest city after the State capital Chennai, once a comfortable watering hole for retired military officers, is today a bustling industrial city, with universities and engineering colleges of high repute. However, its modern roots were laid during the British Raj way back in 1866, when an enterprising Briton, Robert Stanes, set up a municipality and became its first Chairman. Coimbatore was up and running, with a number of textile mills which Stanes helped to establish. With the platform of production in place the next inevitable step, entailed the communications that would take the goods to market, hence the railway system made its bow. A road network grew in parallel, bringing supply and demand were into equilibrium. The fledging city’s location was an added bonus, as geography has a critical role in economic and social development. Coimbatore lay astride Tamil Nadu’s border with Kerala, thence onward to the west coast abutting the Arabian Sea and the markets of East Africa: Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Zambia, Zimbabwe and the Republic of South Africa; up north to the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt.
Coimbatore’s salubrious climate, nestling in the foothills of the Nilgiri range, coupled with its unfolding industrialization made it an attractive place to live. Its educational institutions brought in families with young aspirants seeking career opportunities. The economic boom led to a significant rise in population, outpacing the infrastructure: housing and public transport, with new privately-owned cars added to the traffic congestion on streets, roads and highways. Water resources were increasingly polluted and so was the air – the bane of countries in the throes of industrial development. Economic liberalization comes with a price; and intensifying ecological challenges have been a wakeup call for the citizenry. As in Bangalore, so in Coimbatore, it would appear.
Life without challenges would be a dull existence indeed. The greater the obstacle the greater must be the effort to surmount it. Business houses, aware that they, too, are civic stakeholders, have started engaging in social and environmental activity, leading to a broader people’s movement to clean silt from tanks and water bodies. The City Corporation has drawn up plans to link Coimbatore’s eight major tanks and water bodies and inlet channels under the Smart City plan. Corporation Commissioner K.Vijayakarthikeyan says the Public Works Department will be brought in to develop the tanks. Tank rejuvenation is one of the major components of the area-based scheme, but the authorities are looking ahead to new Greenfield infrastructure to take Coimbatore forward and secure its place as a magnet for nerds and their aspiring lifestyles. Summed up, Coimbatore aspires to become a centre of excellence fit for twenty-first century purpose. The city is thus expanding in a bid to create space for commercial activity and business offices and the GPS-enabled transport solutions to match, pavements that pedestrians will find comfortable to move, and easy availability of Wi-fi hotspots. Sewage treatment technologies are also on the radar. A buoyant can-do spirit drives the citizens of this splendid south Indian city. They are best able to monitor its development projects and make the city fathers and officials accountable to the public. Coimbatore means business. Of that you can be sure.
Delhi, Hyderabad airports top global ranking
Shortly before his departure from India, in the wake of the Commonwealth Games, as the Times South Asia Correspondent, Jeremy Page referred sneeringly to India’s chronic inability to construct infrastructure that worked. The Delhi Metro has left the London Underground trapped in the stone age, while Indian airports, once the butt of jokes from superior people, much given to flaunting their social pedigree and lifestyles, will be in mild trauma to learn and digest reports that Delhi and Hyderabad airports have achieved top global ranking.
While the Indira Gandhi Airport in New Delhi, managed by Delhi Airport Limited, a GMR-led consortium, retained the world’s number one position for the second consecutive year in the 25-40 Million Passengers Per Annum category, Hyderabad’s Rajiv Gandhi Airport has featured in the top three airports for the seventh year in a row in the 5-15 Million Passenger Per Annum category. These rankings were announced by the Airports Council International in the 2015 Airport Service Quality recently. According to GMR, the Delhi airport scores a higher rating than its Indian counterparts in winning the maximum number of awards for last year. Delhi has been conferred with the Best Airport by Size & Region Asia Pacific (25-40 million passenger per annum category)
Angela Gittens, Director General ACT World, said: ‘Airports have evolved into complex, customer-focused businesses in their own right, that in many cases are in competition with each other for passenger traffic, from duty-free outlets to restaurants to ambience, cleanliness, courtesy of staff, amenities, efficiency and more air travelers are expecting big things from the airports through which they travel.’ Quite so. The greater the expectation the greater should be the delivery. This in keeping with the spirit of enterprise.
While on the subject, a spate of new airports in India are works in progress, or have already arrived. Kolkata’s, once the city’s second black hole, is now a spanking technological and architectural marvel. Maintenance, alas, has been shoddy because of the Communist-led trade union principle of more pay geared to less work. New airports at Bangalore and Chennai are functioning, while the newly constructed one one in Mumbai commands wonder and will surely win global raking sooner rather than later. Kerala’s Kochi airport, catering the State’s sizeable and growing passenger traffic to and from the Gulf is, by all accounts, superbly constructed and superbly managed.
India’s infrastructure development, from high speed rail corridors, national highways is work in progress. India is surprising itself, while holding surprises for visitors from abroad long by their media to expect the worst.
Fringe groups threaten India’s peace
Fringe groups and their lawless activities have been in the news lately. In the State of Chattisgarh, a gang of Bajrang Dal thugs vandalized a village church and attacked worshippers. The Bajrang Dal first came to prominence over over a decade ago, when one of its operative burnt alive an Australian missionary named Staines, and his young teenage son, resentful of the family’s presence among a community of Advasis in Odisha In another Odisha district, they stoked communal violence, when it was wrongly claimed Christians in a rural hamlet had murdered a prominent Hindu priest. It turned out that priest was killed by local Maoists. The political reverberations led to Odisha Chief Minister Navin Patnaik to sever party ties with the BJP. Staines widow, unbelievably, forgave her husband’s murderer and interceded on his behalf to prevent his judicial execution. Christian charity, you may say, but it emboldens Bajrang Dal and kindred bodies such as the Ram Sena in Goa to attach Christian properties and places of worship, safe in the knowledge that no jihadi retribution would follow. Then Goa Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar (now India’s Defence Minister) took firm action and put an end to Ram Sena militancy. Likewise the BJP Chief Minister Raman Singh initiated prompt police action, leading to the arrest of seven Bajrang delinquents. The poison stems from the insidious propaganda that India’s Christians are covertly anti-Indian, a wicked and preposterous allegation. Reports from Mumbai on a hate speech by Raj Thackeray, formerly of the Shiv Sena – but now head of a breakaway splinter party - targeting the city’s auto drivers for their Bihari ethnicity. Thackeray’s incendiary words led to rising tempers in the Bihar State Assembly. The Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has been silent thus far and so has the BJP’s coalition partner, the mainstream Shiv Sena. Silence in India’s public spaces is usually counted as a blessing, but not in this case. Is Mumbai to be out of bounds for India’s non-Maharashtrian population? Are Maharastrians to be banned in, say, Gujarat or Kerala? Where is India heading?
Chief Minister Fadnavis must bring Raj Thackeray to book, if evidence of his hate speech is established. Irresponsible politicians frequently get away with blue murder because other politicians in power prefer to cower at the prospect of a riot. The cycle of blackmail and cowardly appeasement has surely run its course. The time for action has arrived. Get cracking, Mr Fadnavis, Mr Modi, before it’s too late to douse the flames.
