Seminar on Infrastructure Management Held at DoMS, IIT Madras

Seminar on Infrastructure Management Held at DoMS, IIT Madras

Department of Management Studies (DoMS), IIT Madras, played host to three eminent personalities - Mrs. Sheela Priya, IAS, Director, Chennai Water Supply Board, Mr. Sanjiv Paul, Managing Director, JUSCO, and Mr. Sudhakar Rao General Manager (P&A), HAL, representing Public Administration, Private Sector enterprise and a PSU respectively. The occasion was a seminar on "Infrastructure Management". The event was also graced by eminent professors from the institute, Prof. V. Kalyanaraman and Prof. K. N. Sathyanarayana, etc., along with other professors from DoMS.

In his keynote address, Prof. L. S. Ganesh, HOD, DoMS, gave reference to the various challenges being faced by the infrastructure development and management teams in various organizations. He also spoke about the campus infrastructure that generally is better developed than the industrial and civil infrastructure.

This was followed by the address of Prof. V. Kalyanaraman. He laid emphasis on the importance of the technical, social and economic issues to be handled while developing infrastructure. The professor finally stated, "We keep pumping more and more money to build roads, bridges, dams, etc., but the underlying point is, can we make these infrastructures work better and more efficiently?"

Mrs. Sheela Priya highlighted "Water Management in Chennai City" through a picturesque presentation. She initiated her talk with the salient features of the city of Chennai like geographical area, population, topography, drainage system, climate, water supply sources and current supply rate. Then she moved on to competent handling of water resources by a couple of slides on the history of development of earlier water supply sources and head works and how the water supply board was constituted. The operational data highlighted was the city area of 175.18 sq km serving a population of 5.32 million and the CMA estimates of water requirements.

Various treatment capacities are available at Red Hills, Vadakuthu (Veeranam) and Chembarambakkam, which still happens to be under construction, and will be finished by 2007. The growth profile of water supply was highlighted by the increase in the number of household connections to more than 3.45 lakh and also by the successful schemes examined and implemented for source augmentation like drawing from Krishna river in AP and a brief mention of non-successful schemes like tapping of the Cauvery river, which could not be implemented because of inter-state dispute.

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Contributed by -
Rachana C.,
Batch of 2005-07,
DoMS, IIT Madras.

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