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Integrated infra facility in city soon

Proshun Chakraborty | TNN | Updated: Apr 9, 2017, 06.47 AM IST

NAGPUR: Union transport minister Nitin Gadkari has hinted at another pilot project aimed at creating a centralized and integrated infrastructure facility linking bus stop, metro station and railway station in the city.

Gadkari said the centralized facility could either come up at Ajni or Khapri, while shifting the main railway station to Khapri, and will be part of Multi-Model Hub and Smart City project.

Addressing the concluding function of two-day Nagpur Smart and Sustainable City Summit organized jointly by Nagpur Municipal Corporation and Elets Technomedia Pvt Ltd on Saturday, the minister said the central government has already directed the state government in this regard. According to him, Ajni will be the best place for this multi-modal hub as railways already has a major land there. The ongoing Metro railway work near the jail, too, will make this an ideal location.

Gadkari also announced that the National Highways Authorities of India (NHAI) will construct 8km hyperloop transportation on the lines of buses on air that would have direct connection from Wardha road to Hingna Square on Orange City Street. It will also be the first pilot project in the country and NHAI is all set to invite tenders for the project, he said. The project will help the civic body to augment its revenue.

Single 'Multi-Mode Transportation Hub' (MMTH) will be enough for current Nagpur population of 24,97,900 people but in case of a city of 60 lakh population 3 such hubs may be required. In such cases, where a city requires more than one MMTHs, what is important to know is whether we can allow different destination hubs for a traffic coming from an external city. Suppose we assume Nagpur population is 60 lakhs then it would be interesting to find out how to minimize number of changes that people have to make just to travel through city say using buses from an external origin city to an external destination city having Nagpur as terminal point. What I am saying is suppose we have three MMTHs, one towards Raipur direction, one towards Hyderabad and one towards Indore then we should not stop all buses coming from Indore direction at 'Indore MMTH' itself. This will force people to use local transportation unneccessarily and create lot of inconvenience to them. Suppose there is a way to know that 10% of people coming from Indore wants to travel towards Hyderabad and 20% towards Raipur then we can allow that percentage of buses to travel through city to other MMTHs. If we do this with more sophisticated Multi-Mode Transportation Informatics (All Public Tranportation Informatics including Road Transportation Informatics & Railway Transportation Informatics) then we can divide traffic in a better way to destination MMTHs. That will reduce number of smaller vehicles (autorickshaws and taxis) on road inside the city arising because of external people movement from hub to hub. For this we need an integrated passenger database system and a better way of integration of data of all regional transportation networks of different states, private transportation, railway and other modes of transportations. This transportation informatics system will be more useful to find out whether we need more buses between two external cities bypassing Nagpur itself. And there may be need for 'Unified Transportation Interface' to interface different transportation companies. Note that I just put Nagpur population at 60 lakhs for explanation sake only and as I posted earlier I feel 40 lakhs should be maximum population for any city (including belts, clusters or satellite cities) for better sustainability.

When we are talking of Multi-mode Transportation Hubs (& Highspeed Multi-mode Transportation Hubs) and Multi-mode Logistics Hubs it is quite natural to think of 'Multi-mode Transportation Informatics' (or should it be called 'Multi-Mode Transportation Resource Planning'?).

Ultimately what India needs is one unified 'National Resource Planning' or 'National Informatics' system where everything including transportation informatics, health informatics, manufacturing informatics, urban/rural informatics, water informatics, environmental informatics, energy informatics and all kinds of other resource planning/management informatics are clubbed together by defining how they have to be interfaced with each other. For example, Railway Resource planning requires to be interfaced with Human Resource Planning as railway also requires human resources. Once we unify everything we will be able to plan everything smartly to get cost optimized results and can become a 'Smart Nation'. Each of ministry should have its own informatics system to plan for resources falling under purview of that ministry and all systems should have interfaces with each other. As posted already earlier all levels of informations (city, village, district, state, country) have to talk to each other so that NITI Ayog can come up with proper neeti (policy, planning) for national development involving villages, cities, districts, states also in planning process.

Wonder how geo-tagged assets of NRSC using 'Bhuvan' platform will get interfaced with Nation Resource Planning (National ERP) or National Informatics system.