Cashless Carnival

The NY times reports a brilliant article on the shortage of hotel rooms in India and its affect on the inflow of tourists and deal makers.

India offers only 1,10,000 hotel rooms. China has 10 times as many, and the United States 40 times as many. The New York metropolitan region alone has about as many rooms as all of India.

Compare India, a country of 1.1 billion people, to New York, a city of 8 million: New York attracted 6.8 million foreign tourists in 2005; India attracted 3.9 million.

In Bangalore, rooms are so costly that traveling salespeople and other professionals often commute by air from as far as Mumbai, 620 miles away.

Infosys, an Indian software giant with 66,000 employees worldwide, has built its own 500-room hotel next to its headquarters in Bangalore. By June, it expects to have 15,000 company-owned rooms across India — nearly an eighth as many rooms as the entire country has, and more than any Indian hotel chain.

Putting an employee up for a night at its Bangalore campus hotel costs Infosys $15, and the guest gets three-star treatment that would normally cost $150, by the company’s estimate.

To me it looks like there is nothing that can be done to improve this situation. Long sightedness is something which our government lacks. Tier II cities which are looking at going the IT way can probably learn from these mistakes and set their house in order before opening their doors to the rest of the world. At this point, I am quite urged to think aloud my plan for a Tier II city which intends to go the IT way. OK.. this plan does not merely talk about the hotels but it’s more concentrated on the infrastrucure issue (another favourite topic of mine)

1. Spruce up the airport so that it can scale up to an increasing traffic inflow (domestic and international). The farther the airport is from the city limits, the better.. so that the entire stretch leading to and out of the airport can be looked for upcoming hotels. It will be really good if some kind of a “hotel zone” be created near the airports to encourage hoteliers to set up business around the airports. If all the hotels are concentrated in one zone, the stiff competition among them will also ensure that the prices are within the limits. Btw, (with no reference to this article) the US has about 19,300 airports and India has about 92.
2. Identify IT Parks / Zones out of the city limits and IT companies should be allowed to set up shops only in the IT Zones and nowhere else within the city limits.
3. Set up a mass transport system like metro railways which connects the airport and the adjoining hotel zone to the IT Parks. This can also be a part of Phase II developments since it is a capital intensive project. According to the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation, the cost of setting up metro in Delhi is about Rs. 10,500 crores. It also states that a city in a developed country considers adopting a mode of mass transport once its population crosses the million people mark. The population of Bangalore is 6 million, It should ideally have had atleast 50 kms of metro rail by this time.
4. Set up ring roads which circle outside the city and exit points lead traffic into the specific areas.
5. The government can look at introducing congestion fees (similar to London) to prevent people from driving to offices unless really needed and use the mass transport instead. Also, if the metros are intoduced as a Phase 2 activity, this will also encourage people to switch over to the metros. Today, though Delhi has a metro rail, the commuter traffic in metros is a mere 2%.

Any more you can think of, so that we can keep this list going?

There was a program on Nat Geo the day before yesterday, which showed how the crew of The Rolling Stones geared up for their biggest live show ever which happened at Copacabana Beach, Rio De Janeiro in Feb 2006.

The concert was free of cost and it is estimated that over a million people attended it. The stage which was set up was at the height of a six storeyed building. It took 2 Boeing 747’s to get all the acoustic systems to the venue. The crowd occupied about half the length of the 2.5 mile long beach. There were about 8 giant video screens and more than a dozen sound towers installed to broadcast the concert for fans who were far off from the stage. The sexagenarian rockers opened the gig with “Jumping Jack Flash”, and blasted out about 20 songs.

10,000 police officers were posted all over the place to take care of any trouble which brewed during the concert. Thankfully there were no casualties, just that:

• About 10 people got squeezed between baricades and were rushed to emergency
• Police rescued about 24 people from drowning in the sea
• One woman went into labour during the concert  

Can you just imagine yourself being part of something of this magnitude? Watching Rolling Stones play to a million people by the beach side? WOW !! Would we ever have something like this in India?

Btw, Another interesting snippet which I managed to google out ;-)

Millions of free condoms were avaialble for those indulging.

When you have samosas out there in space, Col. Sanders will remind you of Zinger Burgers from here.

 KFC has created a huge 87,500 sq. ft. logo in Area 51 Desert which would be visible even from space.

The logo consists of 65,000 one-foot by one-foot painted tile pieces that were assembled like a giant jigsaw puzzle: 6,000 red, 14,000 white, 12,000 eggshell, 5,000 beige and 28,000 black.

It took a team of nearly 50 designers, engineers, scientists (including astrophysicists), architects and other professionals working nearly three months to conceive, create and execute building the world’s largest logo.  

Hmm.. quite interesting, Got to see if Col. Sanders manages to attract any more UFO’s or aliens to the UFO Capital of the World.

I am glad, justice was finally delivered in the Jessica Lall murder case and my intuition says that Manu Sharma will get a life term and not a death sentence since it was a hot-blooded murder and not a cold-blooded one. I believe, the media had a big role to play in this case and I hope they continue to keep the pressure on with the other pending cases as well.

All the news articles I read yesterday and today about this judgement had no mention of Mr. Jethmalani and his whereabouts. Where is he and what happened to all the stories he was concocting about the victim’s character and a sikh gentleman actually being the shooter?

Last week, Delhi was in the news for the 30,000 odd weddings which took place in a day.

Now, it is the case of Runaway Brides. Apparently, there have been 114 such cases registered. I am glad that the girls decided in the favor of love marriage and opted to elope, but why at the last minute? It’s such embarrasment for both the parties. Delaying the announcement of such news to your folks does not reduce the magnitude of the repercussions anyway, so you might as well plan for it, talk it out with your folks and get married in style. What say?