Business Standard

Designing change

Better design leads to better infrastructure and better social behaviour

Image

Sunil MK
The life of a common man in India is anything but regular, full of challenges and myriad day-to-day problems. This is manifested in public behaviour characterised by impatience and hurry. You will find people jumping queues, two-lane roads becoming five-lane roads as vehicles try to get ahead, incidents of road rage and violence over disputes at parking lots. What is appalling is that all of us in India accept it as a part of our life.

Traffic congestion, potholed roads, general lack of road discipline and chaos tend to carry over in your behaviour in office. Most of the times infrastructural constraints affect the day's schedule. It results in lower productivity and less business for professionals and companies.
 
Only 4 per cent of the roads in India are express highways. Drainage systems are non-functional, inadequate or simply unplanned. Little wonder, at the first sign of a drizzle, people rush home leaving work unattended.

What I find intriguing is that a country that projects itself as the next economic powerhouse still exists under the mercy of constraints imposed by nature, human errors and an attitude of accepting situations that can be avoided with the right mix of knowledge, technology and skills. China's growth story entirely revolves around good infrastructure. It was one of the early movers in Asia, spending nearly 7.5 per cent of its GDP on infrastructure in 2005. Only last year the country approved an estimated $156 billion in new subways, highways and other infrastructure projects. The Chinese example encouraged many Asian countries, including India to focus on infrastructure development and rightly so. The 12th Five Year plan of the Government of India envisaged infrastructure spends to the tune of $1 trillion.

However, despite the good intentions and policy intent, the story on ground is different. A huge chunk of of government projects were delayed due to regulatory and compliance issues of land and environmental clearances and also due to poor planning resulting in unanticipated bottlenecks. The last Five Year plan reported that 22 per cent of the projects were delayed resulting in budget overruns by 200 per cent.

An efficient public transportation network that is planned well is the key to connected societies and economies contributing to overall socio-economic development. Planned drainage will promote better health, sanitation and hygiene standards and complement the efficiency of the transportation network. Such developed infrastructure enhances the quality of life and the nature of interactions in the public space. This promotes order, reduces chaos, improving the quality of life.

For all this to become a reality, Indian planners and policymakers need to invest in design technology as a problem solving tool. Design is integral to infrastructure planning in many countries of the world today. Planners and project managers there use advanced design and analysis/simulation tools like building information modelling (BIM) to plan/design and construct a good network of drainage systems not only for just today but for future generations.

To illustrate, when planners use such design technologies to build an efficient drainage or sewage network they can manage infrastructure information more reliably with data-rich water and wastewater models; identify network issues such as leakages and ageing pipes; automatically size the drains for water discharge into a drainage system; and support future decision making for operations, maintenance, and capital planning. This will eventually lead to better waste-water management and also conserve this precious natural resource to ensure a better present and promising future for the country.

All this starts with better infrastructure enabled by better design.

Sunil MK, head (AEC), Autodesk India & SAARC

Don't miss the most important news and views of the day. Get them on our Telegram channel

First Published: Jun 09 2014 | 12:10 AM IST

Explore News