Kerala's three critical issues: Roads, waste and power

The transportation infrastructure in our state is inadequate  to cater to the present traffic density. A good  driver can cover a maximum of 40 km in an hour along the highways  in Kerala. Whereas in developed countries,  Gulf or even in China, it is  100 km per hour, two-and-a-half times  our speed.

The accident rate on our roads is  alarmingly high. In Great Britain, the number of casualties on the roads was  1857 in  2010.  In Kerala, the number  in 2010 was 3950, more than 10 per day.

These facts call for a serious review of our ‘Roads policy,’ if at all there is one, or form a new one without losing time. We need an eight-lane highway from Thalapady in the north to Kaliyikkavila in the south. The alignment has to be along the middle of the state and not through the coast or  the western hill tracts. This highway needs concrete drains on either side and rest areas with stalls at regular intervals. Further, cross- country pipelines and utility corridor must be planned  unlike in other countries.



For this, land acquisition will be the most difficult part of the job. We need 800 km of 60m-wide road. So the land area needed is (800X1000X60)/ (40X100) = 12,000 acres. Considering the land value at Rs 100 lakh per acre, an outlay of Rs 12,000 crore will be sufficient for land acquisition. The cost of construction of such highways will be as Rs 50 crore per km and the entire cost of the project will be  about Rs 60,000 crore.

The NRIs’ fixed deposits in   our banks come to roughly Rs. 50,000 crore as on date. So financing this project will not be an impossible task for  Keralites.

The second grave problem facing our state is the shortage of electricity and the third is waste disposal.  We must be able to process the waste scientifically in a distributed way to the maximum extent possible and the rest should be treated centrally. For the distributed waste handling methods, we must come up with indigenous ideas based on the wide framework of reduce, reuse, recycle, incineration, landfill and processing. For the centralized waste processing, suitable modern plants must be located in every district. The centralized waste processing plants will yield three types of products in solid, liquid, and gaseous forms.

The municipal/ domestic wastes will yield organic manure, water and fuel gas, as seen in such facilities in other parts of the world. Fuel gas will be a boon in this era of depleting fossil fuels and perennial shortage of electricity. So it is up to the government to evolve a successful business model on this twin issues and the result will be ‘two birds with a single shot.’ It is only a matter of time for the governments and private enterprises around the globe to turn to solar energy in a big way. Since our state is situated in the tropical region, we have good potential for developing solar power-related applications.

Our land area is limited, so we must think of converting the entire roofs of houses and buildings to install solar panels. A lot of research and development have  to be done  to invent items suitable for Kerala, and once they are developed and tested, the State Government will have to promote them in a big way.