VIZAG matters - Sohan Hatangadi's Blog

Vizag’s word of the year is “Smart”! Ever since the US offered to develop Vizag as a smart city along with Ajmer and Allahabad the word “Smart” has permeated every Vizagite’s conscience. All you have to do to charge up a dull party is ask loudly “what exactly is this Smart city everyone is talking about?” Once that question is injected into the conversation a riot follows. The mild and polite conversation suddenly becomes animated and opinionated.  Interpretation of what a “Smart City” means flies around like a bug in a can creating quite a buzz. In the end the wise man in the corner, nursing his drink, says that it simply means that the citizens of the city should be “happy”. Then, suddenly, exhausted by the arguments, everyone calms down and becomes happy. Smartness is the answer If we go by the Webster dictionary meaning the word “smart” is defined as (a) “very good at learning or thinking about things “, (b) showing intelligence or good judgment”, (c) “behaving or ta...

Last month our Chief Minister announced that Andhra Pradesh would achieve 100% literacy by the year 2020. This is an important objective, because our state has not been doing well on the literacy front. Here are some sobering figures. The national average literacy rate is 74%. The southern states, Kerala, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu have literacy rate of 93.91%, 75.6% and 80.33 respectively. In comparison the literacy rate in Andhra Pradesh is a mere 67.41% and in Telengana it is 66.5%.    Educational infrastructure is improving The primary schools in our Agency Areas such as Araku, Paderu and Chintapalli are run by the Integrated Tribal Development Authority (ITDA) based in Paderu. Over the past many years the government has been injecting substantial financial resources into the area to build up infrastructure such as school buildings, roads, health, electricity and water supply.  Even though we have the physical infrastructure in place we are unable to deliver q...