State of Indian infrastructure

The Economist puts the Indian Infrastructure sector in perspective. Sample these dismal stats

1. Only 13% of the sewage prduced by the 1.1 billion people is treated, and an estimated 700m Indians have no access to a proper toilet. The result - 1,000 children die of diarrhoeal sickness every day!
2. It takes an average of 21 days to clear import cargo in India; in Singapore it takes three.
3. India’s urban roads are choked: the average speed in Delhi has fallen from 27kph (17mph) in 1997 to 10kph. In 2007, 130,000 people died on India’s roads, 60% more than in China, which has four times as many cars. By the end of 2007 China had some 53,600km of highways with four lanes or more, India had just 8000 km of dual carriageways.
4. Peak power demand outstripped supply by almost 15%, distribution losses are 35%, 9% of potential industrial output in India is lost to power cuts, and some 600m Indians have no mains electricity at all.
5. In the next five years the government plans to increase India’s generating capacity by an annual 14%, or 90,000MW (China added 100,000MW in 2007), but it added only 7000 MW in 2007, itself a record!
6. Though primary school enrolment rate is 96%, the quality of education on offer is abysmal. Half of ten-year-olds cannot read to the basic standard expected of six-year-olds, over 60% could not do simple division, and half the children leave school by the age of 14. One reason is that only half of Indian teachers show up to work.
7. NASSCOM reckons that of the 350,000 engineering graduates who emerge each year, mostly from private colleges, 25% are unemployable without extensive further training, and half are just unemployable!
8. Though the Planning Commission estimates India'a infrastructure investment requirement over the next five years to be $475 billion or about 8% of GDP a year, this year’s investment is likely to be only around 4.6% of GDP!