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India’s airports are unfortunately the first thing a traveler sees, and they are undergoing much needed improvements.  To take Delhi’s Indira Gandhi airport as an example, the airport currently is built to accommodate 12.5 million passengers a year but must deal with 16.2 million (for comparison, Thailand’s Suvarnabhumi airport is built to handle 45 million).  The aesthetics of the structure aside (which are poor, with claustrophobically low ceilings in places), the check-in area actually leaks when it rains.  A third terminal is being built, however, with 35 million passengers a year capacity and the modern features that international travelers have come to expect.  This pattern is true across India, where currently the air facilities are sorely in need to replacement (upgrades to most would not be worthwhile), but also where those replacements are already being built and at a frenzied pace.  Currently, India’s air infrastructure is overtaxed and an embarrassment to the nation, but by 2010 the new airports will go online and by the mid-2010s, India will have a strong air infrastructure.

One of the advantages of having as large and decentralized a country as India, along with the drive to create a completely new air infrastructure, is that good planning and distribution can prevent many of the bottleneck issues some airports face, such as Chicago’s O’Hare.  India’s intensely democratic and populist leanings are an advantage in this regard, as the government is under pressure to improve its “Second Tier” cities, both to avoid large slums forming in its main centers and to spread the coming wealth around.  To that end, India’s new air cargo hub is being constructed at the poorly known city of Nagpur in central India.  Combined with budget air flights flying from airports near, but not in, major cities, this bodes well for avoiding congestion as India’s aviation industry booms, and it is booming.  Relaxed regulations have led to the rise of budget airlines and cargo carriers who have proven far more agile and responsive than the state-involved mammoth, Air India.  In the coming years, the cost of airfreight and travel within and from India will drop and simultaneously open up new economic opportunities in India’s second tier cities now being added to the air system.

Driving in India is, without a doubt, an extreme sport.  A driver on a recent trip said that “To drive in India you need three things: a good horn, good brakes and good luck!”  India’s roads were mostly small one or two lane affairs until massive building projects in the past few years, and the new roads are instantly distinguishable from the old infrastructure.  Old roads tend to lack physical lane dividers, and Indians treat painted dividers as guidelines rather than hard and fast rules, so traffic jams develop very quickly as drivers slip into the opposing traffic’s lane and things grind to a halt.  New roads are not only wider and better paved, but with physical dividers the traffic flow is far more orderly.  A new problem has cropped up, however, which is that most cars on the road (as well as lumbering trucks and motor-rickshaws) are designed for slow crawls through traffic and are vastly underpowered for a decent highway.  What this means for businesses is that any truck shipments will move at, optimistically, 30 km/hr (about 15 mph) even on good roads, as trucks are not very capable at weaving and passing around motor-rickshaws, not to mention the cattle strolling freely in the streets.

At India’s ports the dual problems are a lack of infrastructure and a crippling bureaucracy.  This differs greatly from port to port, but in general the necessary upgrades are being made, but very slowly.  The inefficiency issue is harder to fix, and is a reflection of India’s bloated public sector.  The often-quoted statistic is that Shanghai’s port can turnaround a container ship in 8 hours, but the same ship in Bombay takes 3 days.  Without a doubt, China or Thailand’s ports are well ahead of India’s, though again this is a matter of efficiency (and delays) and not outright capability (India can still deal with container ships, just not quickly) so this is a factor to necessarily add into time calculations, and additional costs of shipping should be considered when weighing manufacturing costs between India and other Asian countries.

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