Conference on Building Infrastructure

Folks, the other day i participated in a Conference on building Infrastructure - Challenges & opportunities. It had all that pomp & show, began with a PM's inaugral address and then followed by sleuts of presentations & keynote addresses by various ministers responsible for handling different infrastructure sectors. Everybody shared their respective visions of development in thier sector, the pitfalls and the way forward. In between these presentations and keynote addresses there were interactive discussion sessions.

What i found astonishing about these sessions particularly was the fact that people who were among the top echeleons of infrastructure industry and even the top bureaucrats of the country were literally shouting and clamouring to ask questions, despite of the moderator having said that please ask questions one by one and desapite of allocating number of questions for each sector. This was just the one side of the picture, on the other hand even our learned minister who were sitting on the stage, were trying to pass on the bucks to the other instead of directly answering the question. I was shocked when once among the participants, one of them, who was a foreign delegate was not given a chance to speak up, instead an Indian delegeate who was a bureaucrat got a chance to speak up. This goes on to indicate the kind of impression that we give to our foreign delegates, then in such scenario how can you expect them to invest in such a crucial sector like infrastructure over which one of our honourable and distinguished bureaucrat announced an investment of around 1 trillion dollars.

This is a high that our politicians & bureaucrats should understand that despite of all that pomp & show of 8% or 9% GDP, they need to improve on these ground realities that goes to the heart of any kind of investments.