Ganga’s Lament

First, they came to build temples grand,

A modern dam in my valley's land.

Silent I stood, who'd question a shrine?

Lost my village underneath Govind Sagar's mighty sign.

Then they came for electric grid lines

Electric veins scarred my skies with silent pains.

Basic need, they said, for factories to thrive

My hills wept, but progress must survive.

Then they came for railway bridges, expressways sprawl,

Symbols of progress, they did install.

Gave my land for the path of Pragati,

Now my Joshimath is sinking, no one hears the plea.

They don't come anymore, the crisis untold,

Silent sinking, as the land folds.

No one left to speak for the fading dream,

Joshimath's lament, a silent scream.

No more they come, the crisis unfolds,

Silent sinking, as the land molds.

No voice remains for the fading dream,

Teesta's lament, a muted scream.

(PPD's interaction with ChatGPT sessions)

UNLOCKING THE POTENTIAL OF ACT EAST POLICY

Connectivity in India’s North-East Region

India’s North East Region has been branded as a paradise unexplored. The biggest challenge for the exploration of this paradise has been infrastructure and connectivity – be it for tourism or for the industry.  The strategic infrastructure development in North East has gained momentum in recent years.

Dhola-Sadiya Bridge or Bhupen Hazarika Setu

The Dhola-Sadiya Bridge or Bhupen Hazarika Setu, spanning 9.15 km over the Brahmaputra River, was opened on May 26, 2017, by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It is the longest bridge in India and positions Assam as a hub for trade and connectivity with South East Asia. The bridge aims to boost connectivity, trade, and development in the North Eastern region.

Bogibeel Bridge

The Bogibeel Bridge, spanning 4.98 km, was inaugurated on December 25, 2018, by Prime Minister Modi. It is the longest road and rail bridge in India and the second-longest in Asia. The bridge enhances connectivity between Assam and Arunachal Pradesh, connecting Dibrugarh and Silapathar.

The following map is a bird’s eye view of Brahmaputra Valley. On both sides of the river lies Assam state, and further to the northeast lies Arunachal Pradesh. The Brahmaputra has a very large river basin making it almost impossible to transport heavy loads across the river.

The points marked A (Goalpara), B (Guwahati), C (Tezpur), D (Dibrugarh), and E (Chapakhowa) are the points from which the river can be crossed using a permanent bridge.

It is only after 2014, that the bridges in points D and E have been made functional with the inauguration of the Bogibeel Bridge in Dibrugarh in 2018 and Bhupen Hazarika Bridge (Dhola-Sadiya Bridge) in Chapakhowa in 2017. Both are one of the longest bridges in the country.

The following is an illustration of what difference the bridges made in the life and livelihood of the people in the valley and also its strategic importance for the development of Arunachal Pradesh in general.

Itanagar to Dibrugarh

As per Google Maps, earlier it took almost 11 hours for a person to travel from Itanagar, the capital of Arunachal Pradesh to Dibrugarh, a big city in upper Assam that has an airport, railway connectivity and a university. This is because the traveller had to take a detour via Tezpur to reach from one place to another.

 

Today, the same distance can be covered easily in less than 5 hours via the newly built Bogibeel Bridge in Dibrugarh. The 450 KM journey has become a mere 187 KM long route now.

 

Roing to Tinsukia

Roing is one of the first towns in India situated in the Dibang Valley, Arunachal Pradesh. It has always been very remote. Before the inauguration of Bhupen Hazarika Setu in 2017, it took a person 18 hours to travel 800+ KM to reach Tinsukia, a small town in Assam.  

Today the same distance can be covered only in 2 hours reducing the distance to only 112 KM across the Brahmaputra.

 

Impact of the bridges

These bridges not only give impetus to the region but are also strategically important from the security perspective of India’s borderlands.

They are stimulating economic development in isolated districts of Assam—Dhemaji and Lakhimpur. The bridges are expected to benefit approximately 5 million people in Assam and Arunachal Pradesh, particularly in the trade, agriculture, and tourism sectors.

They will also facilitate Assam's connectivity with China through Arunachal Pradesh.

(This post was first published on tripurainfo.com)

TRIPURA ROAD TRANSPORT CORPORATION (TRTC): A liability or a potential asset?

Tripura Road Transport Corporation (A Government of Tripura Undertaking) has been established in the year 1969 under the Road Transport Corporation (RTC) Act, 1950.  The main objective of this Corporation is to provided / render an efficient, economical and well-coordinated transport facility to the people of Tripura within the State.

The above para is published in the welcome page of TRTC website. This is accompanied by a Mission & Vision page on the same website which talks about providing “world class bus service”, “innovation”, “sustainability”, “environmental consciousness”, “continuous learning” and other similar heavy words.

However, one fact that every person in Tripura will agree to, is that the TRTC is a perennial loss-making institution which has been of no substantial use to the people of Tripura. Rather it has contributed to the degradation of the environment by increasing the carbon footprints of Government of Tripura. A look at the website makes it clear that the TRTC runs only diesel-powered buses. Not a single electric or even CNG bus comprises its fleet of 23 buses.

It seems that alternative fuel has never been a priority of TRTC or even the Tripura Government.  ONGC has a big establishment in Tripura with multiple gas fields and exploration units. CNG has not been pushed beyond the state capital of Agartala in successive state budgets even though Tripura has been recognized as the largest producer of Natural Gas by the union minister Dharmendra Pradhan himself. 

In a time when Carbon credits are getting more relevant every year, the TRTC provides a lot of potential to revamp its image and functionality and become an asset of importance to the Government. This can be done by replacing the whole fleet with sustainable fuel powered passenger vehicles, preferably electric vehicles (EV). Electric buses have been functional in big cities like Delhi and Mumbai for a few years now.

TRTC has a lot of land area under its jurisdiction, which being government land can be monetized very easily. There is a TRTC bus depot in every sub-division of Tripura. This area may be developed on similar lines of “Railway stations as City Centers” initiative by the Ministry of Railways. All the bus depots may be turned into electric vehicle (EV) charging stations which can be used by the TRTC fleet as well as public by paying suitable rent / fees for charging.

This way, the main challenge of the organization i.e. fuel cost will be reduced drastically while earning carbon credits for itself. Further, the monetized charging stations will generate extra revenue. With that the fleet can be doubled and can be run in sync with the railways providing meaningful services to the people of Tripura while setting an example of transformation through adoption of new technology. 

(This post was first published on tripurainfo.com)

Music in India, Channel V and T Series.

Indians love music. Music is a very integral part of our lives... We like to have music in marriage ceremony as well as funeral.. which has been brilliantly portrayed by Anurag Kashyap in Gangs of Wasseypur.

But we dont like to pay for music. That is why music (songs) became an integral part of formula cinema. Music has never done a independent business in India.

In the 1990s, with some technological breakthrough, Channel V launched as a music only channel. MTV followed. At around the same time Gulshan Kumar made a fortune selling pirated music in the form of Super Cassettes and he eventually launched his original music enterprise with T Series.

MTV and Channel V withered away eventually. But, Indians never stopped listening to music, rather millenials got exposed to global music with the coming of internet.

So what were the strategies adopted by music publishers and broadcasters in the new millennium?
Everyone recognised the potential of internet and we saw a series of apps in India.. Gaana, Saavn, Wynk. Soundcloud entered the market almost a decade ago, while Spotify entered in as late as 2019.

But who is winning the music game in India?

It is the 1990s unicorn T Series, whose Youtube subscribers exceed music streaming market leader Gaana's users by a margin. So what did they do differently?

They understood the basic behavior of Indians that we like music (the content) and we dont like spending much for it ... (Even if it means app space in our phone) plus we like videos (colorful ones).

So while SaReGaMa was working on shit products like Carvaan and Gaana buying audio only rights, T Series quitely built a great video library of all trendy bollywood songs on its youtube.. with hand picked playlists.

Everyone including MTV missed the starting gun. Music streaming battles in India will be fought on Youtube. OTTs will remain niche.

Tripura Insurgency | ATTF | Star News - NDTV | Archival Video

This video is one of the few videos available on Tripura's insurgency during the 1990s. An archival document indeed.

 

But the most important thing is about the report itself.. these were the days when private satellite channels had just started operating and news was just a 30 min slot in a 24 hour all purpose channel.

 

This report was done by none other than Arnab Goswami for Star News produced by NDTV (which used to be a content provider for channels). Skip to the last few seconds to recognize the very calm and composed voice.

 

 

How Amul used the Covid'19 crisis to maximize its marketing activity.

Amul went against the stream and became the most unique case study of the pandemic. When all other brands freezed their marketing activities to conserve cash, Amul went all in.

The strategy was well thought as Amul having a large portfolio was led by its milk and milk based product line. And the supply chain was unaffected in this sector. While the competitors pulled out of market, Amul didn't change any of its advertising budget. But they revised the strategy.

Since most channels were having a dry spell, they gave the lowest rates possible. Amul invested across genres in TV.. Kids, GEC, News, everything. The BARC numbers of the lockdown actually proved that Indians watched more TV then ever.

The most interesting case is the sponsorship of Ramayan and Mahabharat on DD. They diverted all of their IPL spending on the shows and deployed retro ads from 1970s to 1990s. It is a branding exercise that will give returns for a long time. In quantitative terms, AMUL chief R. S. Sodhi claims that they got 3x value as compared to IPL.

Apart from that, AMUL touched a nationalist nerve among the audience who in times of a global crisis were looking upto PM Modi's nationalistic call of 'Vocal for Local'. 'Humara cold drink' ad is a direct attack on beverage giants Pepsi and Cocacola.

How Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize

"Tagore's career as an Indian English poet began by sheer accident. In 1912, on the eve of his departure to England for medical treatment, he tried his hand at translating some of his Bengali poems into English. The manuscript, taken to England, was lost in the Tube Railway, retrieved by Tagore's son Rathindranath, and came later to be rapturously hailed by William Rothenstein and W. B. Yeats. The rest is history.

Gitanjali (1912) took the literary world of London by storm and was followed in quick succession by The Gardener (1913) and The Crescent Moon (1913). The award of the Nobel Prize came in the same year. More collections followed Fruit-Gathering (1916), Stray Birds (1916), Lover's Gift and Crossing (1918) and The Fugitive (1921).

By the time Tagore's reputation in the English-speaking world had already suffered a disastrous decline. Only two more volumes in English appeared: Fireflies (1928) and the posthumously published Poems (1942) of which all but the last nine were translated by Tagore himself."

Source: M. K. Naik, A History of Indian English Literature, Sahitya Akademi, 1982.

[Review] Counting Miles to Ladakh: A vlog of a solo bike ride from Kolkata to Leh.

Image Credit: Amit Sinha

Travelogues have been here for almost 2 millennia, and cross-country bike rides have been epitomized by none other than Che Guevara himself. Amit Sinha's bike journey from Kolkata to Leh, however, has been documented in the highest standards of film production. It is not only a travelogue or a GoPro video of your cross-country ride, but a visual treat made on a shoestring budget which could put even NatGeo to shame. One might choose to see the epilogue before she starts the main series to see and understand the effort he put together to make this "now possible" trip happen. He learnt basic survival skills like self-repairing his bike to medicating himself in case of an emergency.

The production quality is next to perfect. This is an unscripted vlog done by one person alone with occasional help from a fellow rider he met during his trip. Even the "Man vs Wild" guy takes a production team along with him! Most of the times Amit is talking to himself or 'the audience' about his experiences. Occasionally he drops a few well shot drone clips of the Ladakh desert. Those shots are treasurable visual treats. The filmmaker has taken a lot of pain to make the journey a watchable movie. He talks about often how he had to come back again through tough terrein to get his camera after taking a third person POV shot using his tripod. His filmmaking skills are commendable.

The traveler is entertaining. He shared his unedited fear and enjoyment with the audience. He cries on camera after reaching the hills when he realizes that he did the undoable; he sings silly songs when he gets bored of straight unending highways; he speaks to locals collecting experiences for himself and his audience. He is strong and determined. The first night inside his self-made camp at an unknown location does bring in a mood of scare. In one episode, he falls down with his leg stuck under the bike. He waits there for more than 20 minutes before a passerby comes for help. The 'scene' reminds of the movie 127 Hours. The unscripted nature of the videos have made sure it captured both his politically incorrect speeches as well as concern for the society. And yes, Ladakh is beautiful, please don’t dump your plastic there if you visit.

The Rider is excited but cautious. Initially during the Kolkata to Delhi ride, he seems chilled out. But once he enters the rough roads of northern Himachal, he starts to lose his composure. Luckily, he gets a fellow rider @astronaut_on_road (Gautam) who becomes his humsafar. They both go off the roads in the desert near Pangong Lake. Very few riders would have done off-roading in that highly volatile warzone. They get lost in nowhere, and somehow navigate their way back. It is also interesting to note that BSNL has been their saver in that remote area. No other profit-making network operated for Ladakh, but BSNL did. Another example why public funded institution should be cared for.

Some voyages are made for heroes. And a hero emerges out of an average person obsessed with a great idea. During his 2500 odd kilometer trip Amit constantly reminds us that he is not a trader of dreams. His leaves are getting exhausted and he has an office to rejoin. In our 9-5 scheduled lifecycle, most of us won’t even dare dreaming of such a solo trip. Maybe that’s why heroes like Amit exist to take us along with them. The experience may be personal, but it has been very caringly shared. I guess we should all thank YouTube too for making this series happen.

Watch the whole Youtube series here.