Space mission to help fix land market

This is a real revolution, we need a 100 more revolutions like these.

Space mission to help fix land market

Cartosat-2A, which India put into orbit last week, has begun beaming pictures of the hinterland, setting stage for what may be a revolution in country's finance

 

Andy Mukherjee

Arocket head being carried on the backseat of a bicycle. That’s how French photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson’s camera captured the initial years of India’s space programme, which began in the early 1960s.
   Many of the programmes critics noted at the time that Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was squandering the country’s severely limited budgetary resources on an elitist reverie far removed from the realities of the newly decolonized, poor nation. Author and former United Nations diplomat Shashi Tharoor described the tension in his 2003 biography of Nehru. “There was no limit to his scientific aspirations for India, Tharoor wrote in “Nehru: The Invention of India.’’ “And yet the country was moored in the bicycle age at least partly because of his unwillingness to open up its economy to the world.’’ Four decades after Nehru’s death, his economic legacy, especially a dangerous flirtation with Sovietstyle state planning, stands largely discredited.
   Yet his scientific aspirations are coming to fruition in an India that is twice as open to the world as it was just a decade ago, judging by the flow of trade and overseas investments in relation to the size of the economy. Last week, India put 10 satellites into orbit in a single mission, creating a new world record.
   Among the payloads was Cartosat-2A. It’s an indigenously developed remote-sensing satellite that has already begun beaming high-resolution pictures of the Indian hinterland, setting the stage for what may be a revolution in the nation’s finance. India has already made extensive use of domestically developed communication satellites. In the mid-1980s, satellites made it possible for India to export computer software written in Bangalore to the US. In the 1990s, the same technology enabled India to set up a modern, nationwide, electronic stock market circumventing the lack of a robust, terrestrial communication network.
   In Andhra Pradesh, students in remote villages get access to an English teacher in the city via a satellite link. Later during the day, the same link may be used to set up a video conference between an urban doctor and his rural patients. Indian scientists have also effectively used images from outer space to map the missing nutrients in barren land so it can be reclaimed for agriculture. The next step is to combine satellite pictures of landholdings with field surveys and create a unified register of property titles.
   That’s going to be a key use of the images obtained from Cartosat-2A. These will have a resolution that’s 36 times sharper than that of the images clicked by India’s first remotesensing satellite in 1988. “Land is probably the single most valuable physical asset in the country today,’’ a government-appointed committee on financialsector development noted last month. “Unfortunately, the murky state of property rights to land makes it less effective as collateral than it could be,’’ said the panel headed by University of Chicago economist Raghuram Rajan. Improving the collateral value of land will mean more bank credit to more entrepreneurs at cheaper rates. The first stumbling block to achieving this goal in India is the absence of reliable visual representations of what a landholder actually owns; surveys in India have traditionally covered farmland because the British rulers had a strong revenue interest in it. Rural and urban dwellings have largely been left out. Not just that.
   A survey in Andhra Pradesh found that 9% of village maps were either torn or faded; an additional 29% were missing from official records. “Unless alternative options — for example, use of satellite imagery — can be explored, reconstituting village maps in the 30-40% of cases where these are either missing or not usable will require huge amounts of fieldwork,’’ noted a 2007 World Bank study. “Given the cost involved, it isn’t surprising that this has rarely been done in practice.’’
   More than five years ago, McKinsey warned that India was losing as much as 1.3 percentage points of economic growth because of distortions in the land market, including titles that weren’t legally foolproof.
   One of the indirect costs shows up in very small farmers not leasing out their land to those who actually have the stomach for taking the risks associated with agriculture. If the owners of small strips of land were assured that by handing possession of their holdings to someone else they weren’t diluting their ownership rights, they would gladly do so and come to cities to supplement their rental incomes. Urbanization will accelerate; manufacturing industries will gain a competitive advantage from cheaper labour. None of this is happening now because of dodgy property rights.
   “Land title in India is uncertain and there is no assurance of clean title,’’ Ascendas India Trust, a Singapore-based owner of office property in India, told potential investors last year. “Title records provide for only presumptive title rather than a guaranteed title to the land.’’ All that may change. The Indian government is planning a mammoth resurvey of all land—partly using satellite imagery—with the ultimate objective of creating a digital repository of all land records. The spirit of private enterprise that was stymied during Nehru’s rule — and crushed under his daughter Indira Gandhi’s reign — is already witnessing a surge. And it’s getting a boost from Nehru’s insistence on inculcating a scientific temper among his countrymen. BLOOMBERG

 

 

 

A chore made easier

A chore made easier

Housekeeping attendants at the newly opened Crowne Plaza Changi Airport hotel will not have to contend with sore backs when they clean its 320 rooms. This is because each bed has a device that lifts the mattress to an attendant's waist level, so that she can vacuum under it without straining her back. The device can also move the bed away from the wall, to ease the changing of beddings. The hotel is the first here to introduce this device. It is part of an ongoing programme by the Workforce Development Agency (WDA) to have jobs in various sectors re-designed so that older workers and housewives, among others, can be brought into the workforce. Each device costs $500, but the WDA subsidises $400. Another six hotels are due to install the device over the next two to three months. The WDA hopes to get 20 more hotels on board in one to two years. Hotels here hire some 4,000 housekeeping attendants, who are paid about $1,000 a month. Another 1,000 such workers will be needed in the next three years as more hotels are being built, the WDA said.

 

 

Empowered villages

ABB brings electricity to lost villages of Rajasthan

 

Anshita Singhania

 

   THERE’S NO power today. Imagine reading this in the newspaper in the morning. You would immediately jostle up the morning’s tasks, try to use all your machines so that your work for the day isn’t delayed. Well, if this is the urban paranoia about power-cuts, imagine a situation where you had to live without electricity. There are houses in Rajasthan which have never seen electricity.
   Just as Shahrukh Khan in the movie ‘Swades’ brought electricity to a village, ABB has provided electricity to villages in Rajasthan. As part of its ‘Access to Electricity’ programme, a corporate social responsibility of the company, they have provided power to parts of Western Rajasthan through solar photovoltaic (SPV) home lighting system. Mr Biplab Majumder, country manager & MD, ABB India, says: “Around one-fourth of the world’s population don’t have access to electricity and rely on other, often primitive energy sources”. He said that the average income of a family in west Rajasthan is around Rs 45,000 annually and many families are below poverty line.
   “In the first phase (2006-07), ABB India’s ‘Access to Electricity’ programme brought power supply to around 800 households in five villages in the interior desert areas of Rajasthan, where no grid existed and was considered unviable due to the scattered nature of the villages,” he explains. The only advantage was that Rajasthan had an average of 325 days of sun. “Scattered dwellings across four hamlets were equipped with solar panel units that helped bring light to their homes. The project was continued in 2007 with another 400 homes being illuminated,” he says.
   The project, based on a publicprivate partnership model, involved the ABB, the Rajasthan government and an NGO. It was started in a hamlet with power generated by solar panels. Solar photovoltaic cells convert solar energy into electricity which is stored in a battery bank. It is through these batteries that electricity is generated. Solar voltaic pannels are also used to run household appliances like lights, fan, small TVs, radios, CD players and to charge mobile phones. As a result, the people of Hanumangarh, Balau, Lakhania Ki Dhani and Khoksar saw drastic improvement in their social, economic and environmental conditions.
   People here are mainly involved in carpet weaving, animal husbandary, carpentry, basket weaving, shoe making and tailoring. Due to lack of light, they had to complete their work before dusk. This resulted in less production and low income levels. The situation has changed now. Mr Majumdar says: “It has helped small enterprises grow. This helped increase the income and create opportunities for education and employment. There has been an increase of productive hours by 3-5 hours per day and now they can work longer in the evenings.” This has helped people take more orders and also reduced migration of people to other cities. People have also started sharing the cost of SPV. The area is visited by ABB employees regularly who check the systems and assess the overall impact of this project.
   “Another remarkable result has been the emergence of a service industry for maintenance and repairs of SPV systems. There has been a rise in the employment opportunities for the local youth,” he said.
   According to a survey conducted, the average income of people had increased from Rs 24,000 to Rs 30,000. Almost all households have a mobile phone charged with SPV systems. A few people who owned mobile phones previously had to travel around 10 km and pay Rs 10 to charge their phones. “The women can now cook at leisure as they had to finish all their work before sunset earlier,” Mr Majumder added. Health conditions of the people here have also improved as they no longer have to inhale the fumes of crudely-made kerosene lamps or strain their eyes.
   Electricity has also enabled students attend coaching classes after school hours in the evening. Earlier, the schools in the village had no proper infrastructure and most of the boys studied up to standards 10 or 12 and the girls studied up to standards 8 or 10. But now, according to data from ABB, there has been an increase in school enrolment. The academic performance of students too had improved significantly. Daily attendance has increased by 15%, says Majumder. The number of girl students has increased from around 28 in 2005-06 to 37 in 2006-07 after electricity entered their lives.
   Mr Majumder said that security at night had increased. Earlier, people never had time to socialise as they were busy working the whole day and at night they never went out. But now, they have time to attend social gatherings after the sunset. “We at ABB believe in making a difference to the communities we operate in. As a power company, we are indeed proud of this project where we bring light to many households who would otherwise have remained deprived. It is also making a big difference to their lives from a social and economic perspective,” says Biplab Majumder, country manager & managing director, ABB India.