IISc Bangalore to complete project on transportation by April

By April next year, we will not only know about how the Indian transportation model stacks up against those in the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China), as well as Germany and United States but will also understand how the infrastructure is likely to be by 2020.

An ambitious project, taken up by the Civil Engineering Department of Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore titled ‘Global Mobility Monitor Network (GMMN)’, funded by the Institute for Mobility Research (ifmo) in Germany, will have a global team comprising those from the participating nations. “The BRIC nations are generally recognised as fast growing economies and we will compare the transport model with those in other BRIC nations and then we will compare it with USA and Germany as they are developed nations.

The parameters we will be looking at include transport demand in the country, supply and our policy measures,” said Ashish Verma (principal investigator), assistant professor, Department of Civil Engineering and Center for Infrastructure, Sustainable Transportation and Urban Planning (CiSTUP). Everything from parking charges levied in the country will be processed by the team, according to Verma. “We will assess the cost of owning a vehicle in the country, parking charges and the cost of public transportation.The report will compare these with the rest of the nations. We will also forecast what can be expected by 2020. Everything from mobility of our national highways to the railways and roadways will be taken into account,” he said.

Set to attract international stakeholders
According to Verma, the final product, which will be ready by April, will be useful for international stakeholders who are interested in investing in any of the BRIC nations. “With the data that we collect, everyone from those involved in public transportation to consultation companies will know where they can invest moving forward. There is a lot of interest in fast growing economies like India,” he said.

The project is budgeted around one lakh euros. India will get about `14 lakh from the budget. “There has to be a lot of interaction with various stakeholders in the country including government agencies. We have narrowed down on six cities in the country in terms of geographical location and cultural context and will be using them as a sample for the rest of the country. We have reached out to various state governments for data. We will also rely on open source data available to the public,” he said.

Verma said that the team will also have meetings with various stakeholders in each city while analysing the data. The cities that will be taken into account for the project are: Bangalore, Hyderabad, Delhi, Indore, Lucknow and Guwahati. The members of the project from different countries already attended a workshop at the end of June this year where various transportation problems in those nations were discussed. “While the models may look different, they have a lot of similar issues like congestion of roads” he said.