Marketing to Rural India: Making the Ends Meet - India Knowledge @ Wharton

Published: March 08, 2007 in India Knowledge@Wharton

On one side are the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) and the consumer durables companies. On the other are consumers in rural India, potentially the largest segment of the market. Finally, the two are coming together.

The fact that this has not happened in the past is not for want of trying. In Mumbai and New Delhi corner offices, executives have long recognized that to build real sales volumes they will have to reach outside the big cities. In several categories, rural India already accounts for the lion's share. According to MART, a New Delhi-based research organization that offers rural solutions to the corporate world, rural India buys 46% of all soft drinks sold, 49% of motorcycles and 59% of cigarettes. This trend is not limited just to utilitarian products: 11% of rural women use lipstick.

Other numbers are equally revealing. According to the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), an independent, non-profit research institution, rural households form 71.7% of the total households in the country. Spending in this segment is growing rapidly and consumption patterns are closing in on those of urban India. Jagmohan Singh Raju, a professor of marketing at Wharton, says: "No consumer goods company today can afford to forget that the rural market is a very big part of the Indian consumer market. You can't build a presence for a brand in India unless you have a strategy for reaching the villages."

Several European multinational firms -- and a few U.S. firms -- have been making inroads into rural India for years. Companies such as Unilever, Phillips and Nestle have long been known to India's rustic dukaandaars, or merchants. Among U.S. firms, companies such as Colgate and Gillette have made considerable headway. According to Raju, marketing to rural customers often involves building categories by persuading them to try and adopt products they may not have used before. "A company like Colgate has to build toothpaste as a category, which means convincing people to change to toothpaste instead of using neem twigs to clean their teeth, which was the traditional practice," he says. "This is difficult to do and requires patience and investment by companies. It's not like getting someone to switch brands."

Companies that have figured this out are doing better in the villages than in the cities. Soft drinks giant Coca-Cola is growing at 37% in rural markets, compared with 24% in urban areas. According to Hansa Research, a market research firm that has published a Guide to Indian Markets 2006, the penetration of consumer durables has risen sharply in India's villages between 2000 and 2005. In color TVs, sales are up 200%; in motorcycles, 77%. In absolute numbers, however, the penetration is still low. Coke, for instance, reaches barely 25% of the rural market. This means the upside potential is huge for companies that develop effective rural marketing strategies.

According to NCAER, the low penetration rates can be attributed to three major factors: low income levels, inadequate infrastructure facilities and different lifestyles. But income levels are going up, infrastructure is improving and lifestyles are changing. Almost a third of the rural population now uses shampoo compared with 13% in 2000, according to Hansa Research.

FMCG and consumer durables companies have in the past tried tinkering with all the four 'P's -- product, pricing, promotion and place-- of the marketing mix. Hindustan Lever -- which is in the process of changing its name to Hindustan Unilever to reflect the fact that it is the Indian subsidiary of the Dutch conglomerate -- is among India's largest FMCG companies. It has been highly successful in marketing in rural India and has been a pioneer in reaching out to the smallest of villages with innovative products such as single-use packets of shampoo that sell for a penny. (The rural consumer uses shampoo on rare occasions; she does not want to invest in a bottle.) Independent agencies run media vans that show movies in distant villages. They have live promotions and demonstrations during breaks.

The area where innovation has moved to center stage is in the fourth P -- place (or distribution). Infrastructure has always been the bugbear of the Indian marketer. Distribution channels can make or break a company's rural marketing efforts. To sell in villages, products must be priced low, profit margins must be kept to the minimum and the marketing message must be kept simple.

Empowering Women Consumers

Hindustan Lever, whose 2006 revenues were $2.8 billion, has been learning these lessons for nearly a decade. The company's Project Shakti (its name means "strength") was born out of this realization, and it has become a case study for business schools and evolved beyond its original goals. "The objectives of Project Shakti are to create income-generating capabilities for underprivileged rural women by providing a small-scale enterprise opportunity, and to improve rural living standards with greater awareness of health and hygiene," says Dalip Sehgal, executive director of the Shakti initiative.

Hindustan Lever's drive into rural India was prompted in part by growing competition. When the Indian economy opened up in early 1990s, multinationals such as Procter & Gamble stepped up their activities, forcing Hindustan Lever to seek higher revenues and growth by reaching into villages with 1,000 or fewer residents. Launched in 2001, Project Shakti was an important part of this strategy. It involved working with rural self-help groups (SHGs) to educate rural women, while also making them part of the company's marketing network. "Women from SHGs become Shakti entrepreneurs -- direct-to-home distributors [of Hindustan Lever products] in rural markets," says Sehgal. "This micro-enterprise offers low risks and high returns. The products distributed include a range of mass-market items especially relevant to rural consumers," such as soap, toothpaste, shampoo and detergent.

The Shakti website features a video profile of Rojamma, a young woman from the state of Andhra Pradesh in Southern India, as an example of a typical Shakti distributor. A mother of two who was left to fend for herself and two daughters after her husband abandoned the family, Rojamma initially made ends meet by working in her parents' fields. She then joined the Shakti project and became a distributor of Hindustan Lever products, speaking in village after village to impoverished and often illiterate women about the need to bathe their children and wash their clothes regularly and also selling them soap and detergent. The commission Rojamma earned on her sales helped provide for her family. "Today she is a proud entrepreneur and enjoys not only the money she earns from the project but also the respect of society," says Sehgal. "The lives of thousands of women have changed because of Shakti."

A typical Shakti distributor sells products worth Rs 10,000-15,000 (around $250) a month, which provides an income of Rs 700-1,000 (around $25) a month on a sustainable basis. While this may not seem to be a high income, it makes an enormous difference to women who live in remote villages in dire poverty. In many cases, earnings from Shakti help them double their household income. Much of the additional income goes to educating children, and also to purchasing consumer durables such as television sets, which further expands the rural market for such products. Some Shakti distributors -- whom the company calls "entrepreneurs" -- invest the extra money in buying vehicles such as motor scooters that allow them to go into more villages.

Indeed, with help from Shakti distributors, Hindustan Lever has been able to reach rural consumers in thousands of remote Indian villages. According to media reports, Shakti distributors now account for 15% of the company's sales in rural India. Meanwhile, the potential for growth is enormous, since studies have shown that just 15% of Indian consumers use products such as shampoo. According to Wharton's Raju, there are behavioural reasons why rural consumers represent a sound bet for companies that are willing to invest in reaching them. "Affluent consumers demonstrate that they have 'arrived' by buying bigger houses or cars. People at lower income levels do so by buying premium brands. This means brand loyalty is very high among less affluent consumers. That is why the rural market is critical for companies. The first-mover advantage is significant."

The Shakti model was piloted in 50 villages of the Nalgonda district in Andhra Pradesh. It has now spread to more than a dozen states, creating 26,000 women distributors covering 80,000 villages. By 2010, the goal is to recruit 100,000 Shakti distributors covering 500,000 of India's more than 600,000 villages. "This initiative has been extremely successful," says Ajay Gupta, CEO of www.ruralnaukri.com, a job site for the rural market.

In addition to the distribution network, the Shakti project includes Shakti Vani (or voice), a social awareness program, and iShakti, a community portal. "Desktop computers are set up in the homes of Shakti entrepreneurs," says a Hindustan Lever spokesperson. "These computers are equipped with software developed by Unilever through which users can access content in categories including education, employment, agriculture, health and entertainment. They can also ask questions on any of these subjects and have them answered by experts."

iShakti is in its early days; it was launched in November 2004. The Vani project, however, is operational in more than 20,000 villages in states like Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Chattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh. Hindustan Lever has also tied up with partners such as Tata Consultancy Services, India's largest software firm, which is actively involved with the iShakti portal, and ICICI, a financial services institution that is involved with providing micro-credit loans. With the network now in place, other companies want to hop on to the Shakti bandwagon. One service that is likely to be added soon is insurance.

ITC's eChoupal Initiative

Another innovator in rural distribution -- the $3.6 billion, Calcutta-based tobacco-to-hotels conglomerate ITC -- has also been trying to build a platform that others can use. At a recent seminar on rural marketing, ITC chairman Y.C. Deveshwar outlined plans to create a trust that could work as an agency through which companies -- both private and public -- could market goods and services to Indian farmers. The trust route would hopefully make other companies more willing to sign up with their offerings. ITC has the right credentials to launch this trust. Like Hindustan Lever's project Shakti, its eChoupal venture has been the subject of several case studies.

ITC's foray into an enhanced distribution network came from the recognition that the existing agri-produce distribution channels were inefficient. The company exports various agricultural products -- soybean, rice and wheat, to name a few. It needs to source them from farmers.

"In 2000, ITC embarked on an initiative to deploy technology to reengineer the procurement of soybeans from rural India," says S. Sivakumar, CEO of ITC's agri-business division. "Kiosks -- called eChoupals -- consisting of a personal computer with Internet access were set up at the villages." He explains that soybean farmers could access this kiosk for information on prices, but had the choice to sell their produce either at the local market or directly to ITC at their hub locations. A hub location services a cluster of eChoupals. By purchasing directly from the farmer, ITC significantly improved the efficiency of the channel and created value for both the farmer and itself.

"While the eChoupal network was initiated to facilitate more efficient and effective procurement, the connectivity -- both physical and informational -- between the farmer and the market that it facilitated has allowed ITC to use it for distribution of goods and services from the market to the farmer," says Sivakumar. It has thus evolved into a business platform.

The eChoupal infrastructure consists of:

• A kiosk with Internet access in the house of a trained farmer, called a Sanchalak. This kiosk is within walking distance of target farmers.

• A warehousing hub managed by the former middleman, called a Samyojak. This is within a tractor-driveable distance of target farmers. (The former middlemen were given a role to avoid resistance to the project. They joined because they could see that their traditional business was in jeopardy.)

• A collaborative network of companies orchestrated by ITC with a pan-India presence.

This is, of course, a simplified structure. And there has been a stream of new initiatives. For instance, in August 2004, ITC introduced the Choupal Sagar, a rural retail outlet at the hub. The first was set up at Sehore in Madhya Pradesh. "This 7,000 sq. ft. mall sells consumer goods as well as agri-products," says Sivakumar.

The benefits to the farmer are obvious. And ITC itself gains. Apart from the more efficient channel, there is money to be made from the reverse flow. In 2005-06, ITC generated $23 million selling chemicals and fertilisers. That may not sound like much, but it's early yet. In a recent move, ITC has set up its first urban outlet, the other end of the eChoupal chain, to retail fresh fruit and vegetables.

What about other companies? Does it make sense for them to climb on the bandwagon? Sivakumar gives the example of PI Industries, which has increased its market share in Madhya Pradesh from 12.3% in 2003 to 33% in 2005 after partnering with ITC to sell through the eChoupal. "The eChoupal project is already benefiting more than 3.5 million farmers," says Sivakumar. "Over the next decade, the eChoupal network will cover more than 100,000 villages, representing one-sixth of rural India, and create more than 10 million e-farmers."

Room for All

Both Project Shakti and eChoupal have been around for less than a decade. Which is likely to succeed? Observers say there is place for both; the Indian rural market is huge. According to Wharton's Raju, while Shakti and eChoupal are different in orientation -- one focuses on individuals while the other is corporate-based -- each has been very successful in its own way. "You can't think of success just in financial terms," he says. "Both projects have created tremendous goodwill for Hindustan Lever and ITC." That is no small asset, especially for ITC, whose initials once stood for Indian Tobacco Company.

Sivakumar claims the ITC model is superior because it involves two-way traffic. "We are starting with raising rural incomes," he says. "The level of affordability in rural India is low. For consumers to buy products, you have to first put more money in their pockets. We are creating a virtuous circle of higher income, higher productivity and higher consumption." He adds that there is a distinction between the commission paid to Shakti entrepreneurs and the micro-credit arranged for them, and the eChoupals' efforts to raise rural incomes by improving agricultural efficiency for the whole community. At Hindustan Lever, company officials are equally confident about Project Shakti. They say they are in the business of creating entrepreneurs and arranging micro-credit for them. This, too, has a catalyzing effect on the whole community.

Raju believes that the drive to gain access to rural retailers is, in some ways, as critical as the one to reach consumers. "If you look at rural retail in India, the outlet size is very small. Merchants will often stock just one brand in a category; they do not have the resources to stock multiple brands. They will stock the brand that sells the most."

This lesson has hardly been lost on Indian-owned companies. Over the coming months, the battle for rural wallets will include not just European and U.S. multinationals but also fast-growing Indian companies. A retail initiative by the $22.6 billion Reliance Industries is a case in point. The Mukesh Ambani-led group plans to pump in $5.5 billion over the next few years to create a farm-to-storefront infrastructure for a pan-India retail network. (Only part of this money is for the rural component.)

Mukesh Ambani has company. Brother Anil Ambani, who parted ways with him in 2005, is connecting rural India through Reliance Infocomm, a mobile services provider. Its network now encompasses 240,000 towns and villages, accounting for 42% of the rural population. It plans to double the rural coverage to 400,000 villages, making up 50% of the rural population.

There are many others. The rural initiative of the Mumbai-based $1.3 billion House of Godrej -- Godrej Aadhaar -- plans to set up 1,000 stores across India in the next five years. Delhi-based telecom major Bharti Airtel chairman Sunil Mittal has tied up with Wal-Mart, which will need its supply chain. From the Goenkas to the Gulabchands, from the Tatas to the Thapars, every major Indian business group has plans to move into the hinterland.

Like Thoreau and Tolstoy, Gandhi, revered as the father of modern India, believed that the country's future lay in her villages. These days, every marketer would agree.

Opening a Big Box: Organized Retail Confronts the Challenges of Local Markets - India Knowledge @ Wharton

Published: March 20, 2008 in India Knowledge@Wharton

Unused to modern, organized retailing, the Indian consumer is still figuring out how to extract value -- beyond lower prices -- from the stores, supermarkets and shopping chains that are popping up everywhere. Meanwhile, retailers face other challenges: Indian consumers shop frequently and are used to travelling short distances to their stores; brand penetration is lower compared to developed-country markets; and interstate goods movement is fraught with taxes, delays and other inefficiencies.

All that means warehouses have to be closer to stores, which in turn have to be closer to their so-called "catchment" areas, where the new retailers have to build store-specific customer loyalties. Training large numbers of employees in such virgin territory, and promoting retailing as a respectable and attractive career path, are other challenges, according to senior executives from Best Buy, Staples and Aditya Birla Retail, who participated on a panel titled, "New Paradigms in Indian Retail," at a recent Harvard Business School conference.

"Indian consumers themselves don't know what they want," said Sumant Sinha, CEO of Aditya Birla Retail, which has rolled out 500 stores across India in the past year and is part of the $24 billion Aditya Birla Group. "They are evolving," he said, especially those in urban settings. "You put a hypermarket in front of them; they've never seen it before. So there's no way they can understand the concept. You really have to go with your gut in India and wait for the reaction."

The Aditya Birla Group began considering a foray into retailing after it was approached by Wal-Mart a couple of years ago, Sinha recalled. Those talks didn't progress "because they were looking only for a front-end partner. We like to control our businesses."

But the group found the numbers compelling. "India is a trillion-dollar economy, of which retail accounts for about 40%," he noted. "Of that, 40% to [nearly] 60% is spent on food and groceries, and of that, about 60% is rural and 40% is urban." The group recognized that "the food and grocery business was under penetrated from a retailing standpoint," and that drove its decision to enter the business. Within a year of launching operations, the company has 500 supermarkets, employs about 10,000 people and is hiring at the rate of a thousand employees each month, he added.

What struck Sinha right away was "the fact that Indian consumers are extremely value conscious." For them, "value is not just price" and includes other connotations such as "quality, convenience and trust." Most other Indian retailers are going after price to build customer loyalties, and are perhaps getting it wrong, he said. "It's not as if they haven't been shopping before organized retailing arrived -- they have been shopping for decades and decades at mom-and-pop stores. It's about shifting these consumers from their existing shopping behavior into a different shopping behavior; they are also testing the new format. At this point of time, you have to just go with what you think will work. It's very early days to figure out how that will play out."

Lukas Ruecker, who oversees emerging market business as vice president at Staples, the office products retail chain, agreed with Sinha's assessment. "The market is changing so rapidly in India that we haven't even invested in consumer research," he said. "This is going to be an ongoing experiment. The Indian consumer doesn't know what he wants; you have to shape his opinion."

Describing Staples as a cautious strategist that would "rarely be caught being first at anything," Ruecker noted its first international foray was into China in 2004, followed by Brazil, Argentina, Taiwan and then India about six months ago. He expects Staples to open 11 stores in India by the end of this month. Staples' Indian business is made up of both retail stores and institutional customers it serves with "the only pan-Indian delivery system for office products," he said. It partners with the Mumbai-based Future Group, a fast-growing diversified business house with prominent organized retail banners including Pantaloon and Big Bazaar.

"When you enter emerging markets like India or China, you really learn only through experimentation," said Kal Patel, executive vice president of emerging business at Best Buy. He recalled that when he worked on Best Buy's China launch a few years ago, "we had to throw away consumer research. The assumptions you have from a top-down marketing standpoint don't stand up in these markets."

In developed markets, "you can sit down in a corporate office with a whole bunch of analytics and make predictions for next year," Patel said. "In [China], we're asking our store managers and store employees to tell us what they think they can grow if we give them more tools and the things they need. They are coming back with three or four times more optimism."

That strategy is ideal for Best Buy in its new markets, according to Patel. "The general principle is: The more local you go, the more front-end you go and ask the people who are serving [customers] -- whether in rural markets in India or in big cities somewhere else -- the better is your understanding of emerging trends," he said. "Fundamentally, we engineer our company based on the demand we get from the very, very different micro segments."

Half-empty Stores

Harvard professor of business logistics Ananth Raman, who moderated the discussion, asked Patel and the other panelists about their experiments with the design of their stores in India and how that might be different from those in their home countries. Best Buy has yet to enter the Indian market, but Patel recalled a conversation with his company's store designer who was tapped a while ago by an aspiring Indian retail group to replicate Best Buy stores in India. He refused to do the work, because using an American design in an Indian context made no sense to him. "The interesting thing is that Indians in India are bringing American assumptions into India," Patel said.

Ruecker said Staples did not copy its conventional store design for the Indian market, but created a wholly new one to suit local tastes. "We used our technology platform and ideas from our experiences in Portugal, Germany, the Netherlands and the U.S., and then modified them for India." He noted that Staples in India has its own logo, different color schemes and other variations "to make them a little more Indian." The response has been mixed. "Some people in Bangalore said it doesn't feel like the U.S. Staples; some others said it was fantastic and they liked it."

Unlike in western markets, the Indian store cannot be as big as 15,000 to 20,000 sq. ft., said Sinha, explaining that the markets there don't have as many brands to be stocked. "That, unfortunately, is the reality of India -- you just do not have enough branded products out there. If you put up a big store, it's probably going to be half empty. You have to think of a smaller-size store." Smaller stores also fit in well with the average Indian family's shopping experience.

"For many, many decades, Indian housewives have been used to buying things almost on a daily basis. You have vendors who come in push carts to your house," Sinha added. Such observations lead to other questions, he noted. "You would assume that this behavior is borne out of a desire to buy fresh food and cook it every day. Or is it because the supply chain for fruits and vegetables is so poor that the food would become spoiled the next day?" Other reasons for buying food on a daily basis may include a lack of storage space or ways to keep food fresh for extended periods of time. "They don't have big houses or big refrigerators. And even if they have refrigerators, very often the power goes off."

Since the daily shopping habit isn't likely to go away soon, Sinha predicted that stores that are far away but have large catchment areas may not work; they have to be closer to customers. "Most Indian housewives don't have easy access to transportation, so going long distances to shop doesn't work for them," he said. "A supermarket in the Indian context is going to be a lot closer to customers and will have a lot more footfalls on a daily basis with much smaller basket, or ticket sizes."

Building Supply Chains from Scratch

Raman wondered if the supply chain in India is ready for organized retailing, or if a wholly new infrastructure has to be developed. Ruecker said for Staples, it was a major challenge in both India and China to move products from its warehouses to stores. "The overall logistics is so much more difficult from a port in Chennai or a port in Shanghai to stores," he said. Yet, unfathomable as it was, the system worked. "You rely on the fact that Indians have always figured out a way to do it. Stuff gets into the stores, it gets there in time, and all our stores are well stocked." But he is not taking too many chances. "We are willing to live with the faith, but we need modern warehousing (in India)."

According to Sinha, the logistics and supply chain infrastructure "has to be built from scratch; it's really about creating a new industry." He said his company started by outsourcing the logistics and warehouse management from third party companies, but eventually decided to bring those functions in-house. It turned out that the main problem the third party logistics suppliers faced was not a lack of expertise, but difficulties getting trained people to track and ship orders, which resulted in lost sales and excess inventories, he said. Aditya Birla Retail decided to take on the training responsibilities. Sinha added that it takes about three months to get new hires up to speed with the requirements.

Sinha said Indian municipal taxes (called octroi) and other laws governing interstate movement of goods also make things difficult. "You can't set up five large warehouses across the country to serve the market," he said. "You have to set up [very small] warehouses wherever you open each store. And so the profitability of each cluster becomes a function of [that arrangement]. The Indian supply chain infrastructure has a ways to go before it becomes efficient. Unless some laws change in India, it is not going to happen in a hurry."

What's more, many Indian companies, including arms of multinationals, are used to inefficiencies in delivering goods, according to Sinha. "In India you had companies always delivering half of what you asked for, and you don't know which half is delivered," he said. "They are not used to organized retailing. They recognize the value and benefits of modern retailing, but it's hard to get the discipline that is required."

"The reason we are in China and not in India is because of supply chain," said Patel of Best Buy. In preparation for its plans to enter India, Best Buy brought together consumer electronics suppliers and posed them the problem of generating efficiencies. "We told them to give us higher gross margins," he said, adding that Best Buy had bargaining power because it went about its sourcing globally. All the suppliers at the meeting recognized that "it was in everybody's interest to bring in efficiencies."

At the consumer level, Patel said he is acutely aware of how customer loyalties work in the Indian market. "You have mom-and-pop [stores] that have relationships with consumers -- they have a relationship with the family and the community. What we would do differently is we want to leverage that. However, at the back end you have so much inefficiency."

Best Buy has a retail academy in China in partnership with a couple of universities, "and that's how we are going into India and that's how you create self esteem for a retail job in that country," said Patel, citing Best Buy's 11,000-strong "geek squads" in the U.S. as one of his models. "Essentially, geek squads are about bringing high self-esteem to computer repair," he said. "We are going to use that [model] in India in sales and service."

The 'Underprivileged Majority': Merging Policy with Practice to Help India's Poor - India Knowledge@Wharton

Published: May 29, 2008 in India Knowledge@Wharton

In the subtext of India's recent economic success story lies "the stubborn statistic of 400 million to 600 million people living in poverty," according to Shanta Devarajan, chief economist of the World Bank's South Asia region.

Devarajan spoke as part of a panel discussion on "India's Underprivileged Majority: The Real Development Story" at the Wharton India Economic Forum, held in Philadelphia in March. India's rapid economic growth can obscure rampant poverty, and flawed public policy is a culprit, Devarajan and the other panelists indicated. A key to helping the poor, they said, is to alleviate Indians' financial dependence and the exploitation that can accompany it.

Despite the rapid ascent of India's economy in recent years, the country's poverty rate continues to decline at the same 1% that it did in the 1970s, Devarajan said, noting that sharp disparities in growth perpetuate "stubborn" poverty. The country's southern and western states are growing significantly faster than those in the east and the north. "The difference between the growth rate of fastest and the slowest growing states ranges from 2.5% to 6.5%," he said.

Employment growth has not been commensurate with economic growth, he added. "Much of this has been really jobless growth," he said. "You aren't seeing much growth and demand for talent in manufacturing and export-led industries." As a result, he noted, the demand for low-skilled workers has lagged behind the demand for white-collar workers. The informal sector constitutes 93% of the workforce. "Firms are very small in India's informal sector. Forty percent of them have between five and nine workers. That's much too small to be able to take advantage of any economies of scale."

Meanwhile, Devarajan added, "India's agricultural growth has not accelerated at all, and that is where the majority of the poor get their incomes. You have 100 million farmers, and they contribute as much to GDP growth as one million businesses."

China's growth in agricultural productivity has been double that of India, and even Bangladesh has done better, he said. "The problem is simple and fundamental: public policy toward agriculture." Public policy has stunted efforts to improve productivity, including populist programs supplying free power and seeds. "Those subsidies don't go to the poor farmers," he said. "They go to the middle class and larger farmers." (Devarajan spoke about these and other issues during a separate speech he made at the University of Pennsylvania last year, which India Knowledge@Wharton covered in an article titled, "What Could Derail the India Express?")

Exploitation and Absent Teachers

Ravi Kuchimanchi, founder of the Association for India's Development (AID), a volunteer movement with 50 chapters in the United States, India and Australia, resists the characterization of pro-poor policies as "subsidies"; rather, in the course of being implemented they become "exploitation." He pointed to the roughly 140 special economic zones being planned across the country, which have triggered controversies over farmlands being acquired to make way for new construction. "The incentives are going to the companies who take the lands from the exploited people," he said.

According to Kuchimanchi, another such "exploitative" program is the government's "Aanganwadi" initiative, which aims to provide basic health care across the country's villages. Funds earmarked for the program are routinely diverted to local officials' personal coffers, and investigations that result from complaints have been a sham, he said.

Devarajan cited additional problems plaguing health care among the poor. India's immunization rates are below those of Kenya, he said. "You expect the public sector to deliver this, but only 8% of such spending goes to the poorest sections. The doctors and nurses are frequently not available; the average absenteeism among doctors is 40%, and this goes up to 60% in Bihar," a northern Indian state. Devarajan said he saw no solution but to "restructure employment policies" and enforce accountability among doctors.

The same level of accountability should hold for teachers, Devarajan added. "Everybody, including the World Bank" takes credit for getting 93% of Indian children in some form of primary school, he said. However, "60% to 65% can't read a sentence in their [native] language, and 55% can't do a two-digit subtraction problem." These statistics came to light two years ago in surveys conducted by Pratham, a nongovernmental organization in India. The surveys found a "high degree of absenteeism among teachers in public schools," from 25% to 40%, Devarajan noted.

What Can Be Done?

Start with feedback, which forces policy-makers to act, said Kuchimanchi, whose organization connects non-resident Indians with issues concerning rural poverty but also serves as a watchdog group for government initiatives. "A system cannot grow without feedback; it is the difference between simple interest and compound interest," he said. "Feedback from the underprivileged, the exploited and the poor in India is not being taken by the government and the corporations. If we don't take the feedback, how do we expect to serve that market?"

Kuchimanchi spoke of government programs that make electricity available to poor Indian rural households. Many such households spend about Rs. 40 (about a dollar) each month on kerosene for lamps. In India's eastern state of Orissa, the government sells electricity meters for Rs. 2,000 each (about $50), which he noted is beyond the reach of many poor households. But the neighboring state of Andhra Pradesh rents meters for Rs. 150 each ($3.50), making them affordable. "So the poor in Orissa don't have power, but those in Andhra Pradesh have it," he said.

Where government programs fail, innovation helps, and Kuchimanchi's organization has developed a technology to help poor households consume less energy. Most use firewood in their kitchens and use large amounts because they can't modulate the heat. Kuchimanchi displayed a box made of hay with a cloth lining serving as insulation material. "This costs Rs. 70 ($1.75) and it saves two hours in cooking rice," in addition to keeping it hot all day, he said. (To learn more about this project and others like it, see India Knowledge@Wharton's videocast interview with Kuchimanchi.)

Such efforts directly help in alleviating poverty, he said, and "exploitation happens only with financial dependence."

Empowering Women and Small Businesses

Empower women with education to catalyze change, said Indira Rajan, chairwoman and managing director of the Minerva Group of Educational Institutions in India's southern state of Kerala. Among many projects, Rajan is currently implementing a program called "Pariraksha" to promote mother-and-child health through hospitals in her state.

Public programs aimed at poverty alleviation, health and education work best if they start with "capacity-building" among women, Rajan said. "Women constitute 48% of India's population, and when women are empowered, so is a society," she said. She called for "the highest priority" in providing education to women, along with microfinance and vocational training.

Women, in fact, are the preferred borrowers at SKS Microfinance, according to Vikram Akula, the microfinance organization's founder and CEO. Their default rates are low, he said. "Women are better entrepreneurs, tend to work better in teams, and tend to reinvest their earnings in the business." SKS Microfinance boasts a 99% repayment rate, providing ample justification for Akula's model.

Akula recounted the example of a woman named Sidhamma in an Indian coastal village. Nine years ago, he offered her a loan of a thousand rupees (about $25). Her family earned less than a dollar a day, and her son was in bonded labor, a form of debt slavery, with a local moneylender, because that brought in some extra money. Thanks to a succession of bigger loans, Sidhamma now runs a frozen-fish business that employs eight people. Her income has grown tenfold. She was also able to get her son out of bonded labor.

According to Akula, microfinance has made deep inroads into rural India's impoverished households in recent years, yet it reaches only a fraction of those it could benefit. His firm has provided more than $440 million in unsecured loans and micro insurance products to 1.7 million poor women and their families in 20,000 villages and slums in India.

A Yale graduate with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, Akula quit a successful career as a management consultant with McKinsey & Co. to set up SKS nine years ago. His firm has 700 branch offices across India and is in the process of adding 50 branches. SKS Microfinance's customer base of more than two million is growing at the rate of 20% a month. It has attracted equity investments from venture capitalists including Sun Microsystems cofounder Vinod Khosla, and Yahoo and Google investor Sequoia Capital. (In a recent videocast, Akula spoke with India Knowledge@Wharton about microfinance in India and his organization's latest initiatives.)

SKS employs a for-profit model, which works best for microfinance institutions, Akula said. India's microfinance sector is attractive to an increasing number of lenders, he said, because "the poor are willing to pay a premium." Despite big gains in recent years, though, microfinance in India "has not been able to scale to large levels." By his count, microfinance reaches barely 10 million to 15 million in a potential market of 450 million households. "If I could change the world, I would end poverty," he said.

Foreign hands building India - The Times of India

Foreign hands building India
15 Jun 2008, 0249 hrs IST, Neelam Raaj,TNN
Time was when there was only the occasional eruption of concrete. Today, India's skyline is a work in progress. But while the towering new skyscrapers, sprawling IT parks, glitzy airports and swanky townships reflect desi aspirations, the blueprint, more often than not, is foreign. Be it a slum redevelopment project in congested Mumbai or Kolkata's new museum of modern art, the global imprint on the country's fast-changing urban landscape is evident. Made in India but designed by a clutch of foreign architects looking to cash in on the country's real estate boom. For Edinburgh-based RMJM, the company behind the distinctive Scottish Parliament, a foray into India four years ago has translated into business of £1 billion. That, the company says, is unprecedented for a UK architecture firm doing business in India. "There's a cue here for UK business — we need to be in India in a very big way," says RMJM CEO Peter Morrison. RMJM, which currently has 38 projects under way in India, is now looking to establish a permanent base in Mumbai. Many others have taken the cue. Celebrated British architect Lord Norman Foster, who shaped London's skyline with buildings such as the Gherkin and designed the Reichstag in Berlin, has entered India in a tie-up with a Mumbai real estate firm, the Neptune group. Other big UK names in India are Laing O'Rourke, Davis Langdon and Mott MacDonald. Not just UK, firms from Canada (Arcop) to Australia (Omiros One) have designs on India. But does India really need foreign architects or is it just about getting a brand on the brochure? Most builders agree it's as much about star power as it is about international quality. After all, well-heeled buyers respond to designers with international reputations as much as they respond to a luxury label like Gucci or Prada. "When people purchase an expensive apartment, a famous architect is extra validation they're making a good choice," says Kunal Banerji of Ansal API which signed up US firm Chelsea West to design Manhattan-style condos at its Aquapolis project in Ghaziabad. The Mahindra group's real estate arm Mahindra Lifespaces, which has roped in US-based architect and design firm HOK (of Dubai marina fame), says their reasons go much beyond the brand. "The selection of an international architect or planner is driven by the unique needs of the project. For instance, the 325-acre Mahindra World City project is one of the largest such developments under implementation and to that extent the width and depth of on-ground implementation experience is currently available only with international firms who have conceived and implemented such projects in different parts of the world," says Anita Arjundas, COO of Mahindra Lifespaces. Size does matter and with Indian developers going beyond stand-alone commercial blocks and residences to converting huge swathes of land into townships and IT parks, a 'foreign hand' does come in handy. "Foreign firms can visualise and handle massive scale. Also, their designs are very innovative. They create landmarks and not just buildings," says Shantanu Malik, DGM-Architect, Unitech Ltd. It's a win-win for Indian architects as well. "Working with foreign firms gives us exposure to international standards. There is a lot to learn from their use of detailing and modern materials," adds Malik.
Unitech often hires multiple design firms for a single project. For instance, it has 10 global architecture and design consultants for the $3 billion Unitech Grande, a super-luxury residential complex spread over 347 acres along the Noida expressway. This project draws on the expertise of US-based mall designer Callison, landscape artists SWA and EDAW, Britain's RMJM for architecture and interiors and HOK for floor plans, besides a course designed by Australian golfer Greg Norman. With so much demand, it isn't surprising that Mark Igou, director in the US architectural firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill Llp (SOM), has been shuttling between New York and India over the last three years. "I spend more than three months a year in India, familiarising myself with the ground situation." And ground reality is what SOM — the firm which has designed the Burj Dubai, which will be the world's tallest skyscraper when it is finished in 2009 — is faced with in Mumbai where it is designing homes for slum dwellers in Mumbai's Santa Cruz as part of a masterplan for Unitech. "It's a unique design challenge — recreating the same sense of community that exists in their current housing so that people don't want to return to the slums they left," says Igou. SOM is also using the services of sociologists and cultural anthropologists to get a sense of the social and cultural aspects of the lives of those being rehabilitated. Whether it's slum housing or a swanky township, India is essential to the design inputs. "Education and social interaction are both important to Indians so our designs will reflect these needs. So residential units would have schools nearby and public spaces for people to interact," he says. Besides projects like the Jet Airways headquarters in Mumbai, SOM is also working in Tier-II cities like Ahmedabad and Nagpur. Be it the Indian ethos or the vagaries of its climate, Uruguayan architect Carlos Ott keeps it in mind when he is on the drawing board. Ott, who has designed a technopark for Tata Consultancy Services at Siruseri, Chennai, in association with countryman Carlos Ponce de Leon, says, "I am constantly studying the history and traditions of India, hoping to integrate some of its characteristics in my buildings. And though my work is definitely contemporary, the clues from the past are integrated in a modern vocabulary." Ott is building on the work that earlier foreign architects have done in India. Apart from Lutyens and Le Corbusier, several other international architects have showcased their designs in India. Ahmedabad's Indian Institute of Management reflects Louis Kahn's trademark style of veering towards monolithic masses resembling ancient ruins. Christopher Charles Benninger designed the Mahindra United World College of India, near Pune. British-born Laurie Baker planned the Fishermen's Village in Poonthura in Kerala, while American Joseph Stein gave shape to Delhi's India International Centre. Now, a new generation of foreign architects has designs on India. And their glittering computer-generated images look set to redefine the country's skyline. neelam.raaj@timesgroup.com

Debating Delhi’s rapid transit system - The Hindu

Debating Delhi’s rapid transit system A. Srivathsan

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The debate on the Bus Rapid Transit System has been acrimonious, ranging from utter dismissal of the project to informed suggestions to revise the design.

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No urban development project in the recent past has received so much attention as the Bus Rapid Transit System (BRTS) in Delhi. In April 2008, a dedicated 5.8-km bus lane was introduced as a pilot project. Two lanes at the centre of the road, one each way, were earmarked exclusively for buses to ensure uninterrupted flow. Of the remaining three lanes each way, two are meant for cars and two-wheelers and the last one is divided between pavement and cycle-users.

Opinions on the new system are split along the lines of what mode of transport one uses. While bus-users are relieved, and enjoy the comfort of the much-improved system, car-users who go through a long wait at traffic signals are not happy. The debates have been acrimonious ranging from utter dismissal of the project to informed suggestions for revising the design. Delhi’s experiment with BRT has become nationally important as about 10 cities, which have opted for BRTS, eagerly await the results of the debate.

Delhi is one of the mega cities in the world that is grappling with transportation. Its population is estimated to reach 23 million by 2021 and the transport demand is expected to increase from about 14 million (2001) to 28 million passenger trips (2021). Of these, 25 million would be motorised trips. Despite the alarming numbers and the fact that buses perform 60 per cent of the trips, the investment in public transport has been poor. Between 2005 and 2007, about two lakh cars were added to the city, while only 5,000 more buses joined the fleet. In spite of having a large network of roads, about 21 per cent of the city area, Delhi is infamous for its congestion, road accidents and pollution.

In 2002, the Delhi government set up a committee on sustainable transport. It recommended that mass transport be given priority. Fourteen road corridors were identified for priority bus lanes and five of them earmarked for the first phase. After a detailed study, the 19-km stretch between Ambedkar Nagar and ISBT was taken up first for implementation. The Delhi Integrated Multi Modal Transit System (DIMTS) was established to implement this corridor. The RITES was the project management consultant and the Transportation Research & Injury Prevention Programme (TRIPP) of the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, provided the design. When the design was approved in 2005, the project was reduced to a 14-km stretch. The construction commenced in 2006 and the corridor was subsequently curtailed to a 5.8-km trial phase. BRTS has been in use since April 2008.

The initial reports of the trial run focussed on the chaos on roads. The media were hostile and car-users found it unacceptable. There was a hue and cry over the safety of the design, and demands were made for rejection of the project. However, the government did not decide to shelve it and recently announced that it was taking a re-look at the design, including possibilities of radical changes to the alignment.

Travelling in BRTS helps one realise its advantages better. The new buses are comfortable and the drive along the 5.8 km is smooth and quick. Nihar Singh, who has been driving for 29 years and operates on route 522, is immensely pleased with the quality of buses — the best he has driven, he says. Without hesitation he declares that the exclusive bus lane is a gift to bus-users. His conductor agrees and so do many others who travel in the bus. Drives on other routes feel the same way — the buses are useful and comfortable. A recent survey confirms that 83 per cent of all commuters are happy with the dedicated lane system of BRT and want it to continue (The Hindu, May 22 , 2008).

Car-owners have a different story to narrate. They complain about the long wait and reduced lane space. Earlier, cars could use four lanes. They have now been limited to two. The TRIPP team, on the contrary, claims that the lanes for cars have been increased. Earlier studies showed that cars could effectively use only one-and-a-half lanes but they have now been provided with two lanes. Car-users are not convinced. For K.T. Ravindran, president, Institute of Urban Designers India, the objective is to prioritise public transport. The reduced speed of cars and the relatively long wait are disincentives, according to him. A.G.K. Menon, a noted urban planner and frequent user of the stretch, feels what one loses out in terms of time at traffic signals is made up by a smooth and quick ride between them. To both Mr. Menon and Mr. Ravindran, BRT is not a stand-alone transport project, but is a part of the larger scheme to improve the environment.

The national integrated energy policy considers urban mass transport more fuel-efficient per passenger km. The transport sector accounted for consumption of 28 per cent of petroleum products in 2004-2005. The increased use of BRT, it is felt, will make a difference to fuel consumption. The national transport policy that laments the low share of buses in the total — a mere 1.1 per cent (2004) — clearly favours increased investment in public transportation.

The low capital cost, shorter travel time and reduced CO2 emissions have been BRTS’ major advantages as an alternative form of mass transport. It is estimated that BRT will cost Rs.5 crore to Rs.50 crore a km as against Rs.100 crore to Rs.1,000 crore a km of other kinds of mass rail systems. Among the public modes, it is the closest one can get in terms of shorter door-to-door transport time. In terms of CO2 emission, U.S. data show that a 40-foot long CNG-fuelled bus in a BRTS emits about 66 grams of CO2 per passenger mile, while a personal vehicle emits about 397 grams. To the much-polluted Delhi, any reduction on this front would literally bring in a breath of fresh air.

While the advantages of BRT are acknowledged, the debate in Delhi has shifted to safety and signal management issues. The bus lanes are in the middle of the road and bus stops are located closer to traffic signals. This, many say, is unsafe and has caused accidents. The TRIPP team explains that by locating bus shelters just before the junction, the bus dwell time and the bus waiting time at the red light could be combined to make pedestrian crossing easy. Many accidents are attributed to undisciplined crossing of the road. Sandeep is one of the many private security personnel who regulate the crossing near a BRTS bus stop. Even at 7 p.m., standing near Andrews Ganj, he has to be alert and watchful. His stories are all about careless pedestrian behaviour. But he is optimistic. “It will take time for people to learn to use the system and get disciplined.” It takes as many as seven traffic marshals to manage a busy BRTS junction.

Moving the bus lanes

The government has, meanwhile, decided to move the bus lanes to the left of the road. The TRIPP design report earlier considered this and rejected it. The argument was if the bus lanes were shifted to the left, the high volume of turning traffic would interfere with the through movement of the bus traffic. In addition, the buses would be forced to stop at every red signal with other vehicles reducing their efficiency. Foreign experts who recently examined the BRTS, as reported in Mail Today (May 16, 2008), also find the shifting of lanes counterproductive. The suggestions increasingly doing the rounds are relocation and redesign of bus stops to include a pedestrian foot overbridge. The visiting experts seem to think that the bus stops should be located about 70 metres away from the signal. On the other hand, the TRIPP team thinks shifting bus stops would increase walking time for interchanging passengers especially at heavy volume junctions. A foot overbridge would mean a 12-metre vertical climb to walk a 6-metre horizontal distance. This is not promising, they feel.

A.K. Sharma, transport planner and Dean of Studies, School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi, reminds us that design is one aspect but “unless overall travel options are improved, there may not be many new bus-users. First, buses have to be made safe for women to use.” The scope to fine-tune the design exists and safety measures could be added. It appears that the contestation here is more about who gets priority on roads. Penalosa, former mayor of Bogotá, in a recent interview to The New York Times, said constructing a good sidewalk is about constructing democracy. Not only sidewalks, bus lanes too have now come to express equality. A beginning has been made in Delhi and it needs to be supported.

© Copyright 2000 - 2008 The Hindu

Inclusive Growth through Inclusive Governance - The Hindu

Inclusive Growth through Inclusive Governance Mani Shankar Aiyar

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For Inclusive Growth, we need to hitch the horse of accelerated growth to the wagon of participative development.

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Sustained accelerated growth over the last five years or so, combined with major tax reforms, has resulted in a miraculous augmentation of government revenues. Buoyant revenues have resulted in buoyant spending on the social sector. In his address to the National Convention, the Prime Minister estimated the increased spending on poverty alleviation and rural development, including the flagship Bharat Nirman programmes, at “four times” the spending in the last year of the previous government: an exponential increase in nominal terms from around Rs.34,000 crore in fiscal 2003-04 to about Rs.1,20,000 crore in the current financial year, over and above the four-fold increase over the decade 1993-94 and 2003-04 from about Rs.7,600 crore to about Rs.34,000 crore.

Why, then, is there such a mismatch between outlays and outcomes, between growth in the booming wealth and income of the entrepreneurial classes in contrast to the halting, uncertain, sporadic and un-sustained amelioration in the condition of the vast majority of Indians? Why is India prospering when most Indians are not?

We remain stuck somewhere in the 120s on the U.N. Human Development Index. After inching our way up from the 134th position in 1994 to just the 126th position ten years later, we actually sank from the 126th to the 128th position in 2005. In August 2007, the Arjun Sengupta Committee reported the deeply disturbing, if widely accepted, figure of 836 million Indians — that is over 75 per cent of our people, “the poor and the vulnerable” — surviving on a daily average expenditure of under Rs.20 a day. Rs.20 a day is the equivalent of what a family of four earns per capita as the daily wage in Tamil Nadu under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme.

A key cause of income stagnation among the poor and vulnerable is that agriculture, on which close to two-thirds of our people depend for their livelihood, has collapsed over the past decade to an annual average of under 2 per cent per annum after having averaged 5.7 per cent per annum over the decade of the 1980s. The Eleventh Plan candidly admits that “GDP per agricultural worker is currently around Rs.2,000 per month, which is only about 75 per cent higher in real terms than in 1950 compared to a four-fold increase in overall real per capita GDP.”

True, the poor have not got poorer. But the rich have got infinitely richer. What Nobel laureate Amartya Sen in a recent article described as the “extremely asymmetric development of the global economy” is also reflected in the extremely asymmetric development of the Indian economy. In contrast to the derisory growth in per capita income of the poor and the vulnerable, corporate profits after tax have recorded an annual average growth of around 47 per cent per annum over the four-year period ended 2006-07 and retained profits as a share of profits after tax have soared from 30.9 per cent in 2001-02 to 73.6 per cent in 2005-06. At the projected rates of sectoral growth, the gap between agricultural GDP and manufacturing/services sector GDP is likely to widen from Rs.6,000 billion to Rs.16,000 billion by the end of the Eleventh Plan. Can a house so divided against itself stand?

I ask this question in these Lincolnesque terms because we have to make our way forward in a democracy where income and wealth may be unequal but each vote is equal and cast at six different levels of government at least once every five years. A democracy in which the terrible poverty of most is pitted against the soaring prosperity of others. A democracy, moreover, in which the deprived vote with much more vigour than the well-off and, numerically, overwhelm the prospering classes politically quite as effectively as the prospering classes overwhelm the poor between elections economically. Therefore, a viable, sustainable economic policy for our country has necessarily to be an economic policy for a democratic polity.

Of course, the incomes of the poor and vulnerable will move ahead only at a fraction of the augmentation in income of the successful Indian. But an increase in general public welfare can be achieved overnight, or almost overnight, by a sensible increase in the access of the general public, especially “the poor and the vulnerable,” to their entitlements of public goods and services. The huge increase in outlays over the last 15 years, and more particularly the humongous increase in outlays in the last four years, have not translated into commensurate outcomes at the grassroots primarily because we continue to rely heavily on a creaking bureaucratic delivery system, fashioned into administrative silos insulated one from the other, that has proved over six decades to be quite unequal to the task of delivering development. This notwithstanding the 73rd and 74th amendments to the Constitution passed 15 years ago, the very rationale of which was to progressively shift the weight of the delivery system from a distant bureaucracy to an elected neighbourhood body which being representative of the people is therefore responsible to the neighbourhood and thus responsive to the people’s needs.

The key areas in which the general public, and more particularly the 836 million who are poor and vulnerable, desperately need efficient and rightful access to public goods and services are precisely the 29 areas set out illustratively in the Eleventh Schedule to the Constitution for the devolution of powers — Functions, Finances and Functionaries — to the elected local bodies. These cover primary and secondary education; dispensaries and primary health care centres; drinking water; sanitation; rural housing; women and child development; public distribution outlets; rural infrastructure, including roads, bridges and culverts and other elements of rural connectivity; veterinary centres; the maintenance of community assets; rural industrialisation; and, of course, everything to do with minor irrigation and agriculture, above all, agricultural extension.

Not bureaucratic development but participative development — that is, grassroots development through grassroots democracy — is our imperative need. The path to such development was charted through the 73rd and 74th amendments to the Constitution, which resulted in the present Part IX (‘The Panchayats’) and Part IXA (‘The Municipalities’). In these two Parts of the Constitution, we have the key to Inclusive Growth through Inclusive Governance. For Inclusive Growth, we need to hitch the horse of accelerated growth to the wagon of participative development.

Over the last 15 years since the Constitution was amended, local level elected self-government has been made ineluctable, irreversible and irremovable. But while the institutions of local self-government are in place, the empowerment of these institutions, in terms of functions, finances and functionaries, has been uneven, fitful and subject to reversal. This is inevitable given that the very Constitution which confers a constitutional status on Panchayati Raj, also leaves it exclusively within the diction of the state to determine the nature, direction and pace of devolution. However, the Centre could greatly accelerate and rationalise this process by adapting the guidelines of Central Sector and Centrally Sponsored Schemes, the principal source of funding for panchayati raj institutions, to ensure the centrality of PRIs in the planning and implementation of these schemes in conformity with the letter and spirit of Parts IX and IXA of the Constitution.

A second crying need is to incentivise the States to further empower their PRIs, as also to incentivise PRIs to be transparent and accountable in their transactions, besides steadily contributing an increased share of their expenditure from resources that they themselves mobilise. Hence the key significance of the recognition accorded in the Eleventh Plan to the “need to build in incentives that will encourage the States to devolve functions, funds and functionaries to the PRIs.” The World Bank would appear to be interested in extending International Development Association support to the Panchayat Empowerment and Accountability Incentivisation Scheme (PEAIS).

Third, is the imperative need to make available untied block grants to the PRIs so that they have an adequate reservoir of financial resources which they themselves, without let or hindrance from outside, can plan and implement for neighbourhood economic development and social justice. The 13th Finance Commission has a golden opportunity to build on the tentative beginnings of its predecessor Commissions by increasing block untied non-Plan grants to at least Rs.20,000 crore a year, particularly for the maintenance of community assets and improved service delivery.

I speak for the inconsequential Indian, the unsuccessful Indian, but also for the Indian who crucially determines the outcome of the democratic process. It is only if governance reforms at the grassroots become the handmaiden of economic reforms, as hinted at in sections of the Eleventh Plan, that we might hope to preserve the stability and sustainability of the democratic process. That is a political imperative. It is also, I trust, an ethical imperative that we will respect.

(Excerpts from an address that was to have been delivered by the Union Minister of Panchayati Raj at Stanford University on June 5. The full text is available at www.thehindu.com

© Copyright 2000 - 2008 The Hindu

Bogota - Building a Sustainable City

Such a simple, yet powerful concept and the will to face the odds to achieve the impossible! Can this happen in Chennai in a way that is suitable for Chennai? Can there be one, at least one, visionary politician who will be able to stand up and fight? This city gives us hopes... lets dream on, lets fight on, lets hope for a better turnaround for our city...