Midweek Musings 9 4.02.26

 

Incorporating HDI

Common Property Resources like road infrastructure is mandatory for Smart City Governance. "Day 64/365 - Hong Kong street lights" by natasia.causse is licensed under CC BY 2.0.


By Malini Shankar

Digital Discourse Foundation

I was recently told “Malini your articles recently are becoming so esoteric that you will be well advised to put it in simple parlance, and preferably in Indian languages if you want our politicians to read and assimilate what you are saying”. So: Simply put Incorporating HDI means calibrating human development on a per capita basis. What is the value that our tax payments are giving us?

How much of our tax returns are being invested by the Governments in Common Property Resources like roads, air quality management, capex on transport infrastructure and logistics, food security, livelihood security, cyber security, energy security, power supply infrastructure, industrial policy, insurance, manufacturing output, management of consumables, clothing and food grains, water supply infrastructure, schools and educational institutions / public education, health care infra, Green Belt, Conservation of ground water table, urban and rural development, solid waste management, sanitation infrastructure etc.

Now like all entities the Government too has limited sources of income: Tax revenues, some loans from World Bank and other international financial institutions and CSR funding: the last of which disappears from the revenue drawers wholly but manifests as social good. Atleast in theory.

Taking a closer view of just one sector: sanitation. Ideally only three persons can and should use one flushing toilet per day. That means one clean functional toilet will be used on an average of 15 to 20 times per day. Calibrate clean fresh water usage in one such toilet and then multiply it for the population and you get a rough estimate of fresh water used and wasted for the most fundamental of human needs: usage of a clean and hygienic toilet. We also need to calibrate discharge of solid waste and effluents so it will help us plan capacity of effluent treatment plants / sewage treatment plants. That will give a clear estimate of how much fresh water can be conserved if flushing toilets are fed with recycled grey industrial water.

My nutritionist went so far as to calibrate my calorie intake per day to regulate my body’s waste discharge – although for diabetes management! So it is possible to scale up planning of natural resource management for human development

Since providing all these indices of development became a huge challenge for governments smart thinking was necessary to optimise resource management equitably especially in the day and age of Climate Change.  

So Green belts serve the purpose of not just green cover but helps in creating oxygen for the populace. So lung space has a whole new meaning in Smart City Governance. A band of green cover between say the Central Business District and residential areas or between sanitation infrastructure and Health Zone will be ideal not just as lung space and serve aesthetics but provides habitat for Urban Wildlife and for Corporate Social Responsibility indulgence. Now that’s optimising resources smartly! 



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