An Infrastructure project can catapult a city and a Nation to prominence

The Erie Canal Project and transformation on New York City

In 1825, Philadelphia was still the largest city in America, with New York City and Boston close behind. But then New York opened the Erie Canal, a massive government project that connected its ports to the Midwest via the Great Lakes. Scorned derisively "Clinton's Folly," or "Clinton's Ditch" after New York Governor and canal proponent DeWitt Clinton, when it opened New York City almost instantly became the greatest boomtown the world had ever seen: "In the early nineteenth century, New York was a large town, but it had a number of peers, including Philadelphia. The key decision that vaulted New York to prominence was the decision to build the Erie Canal. In John Steele Gordon's account of America's rise to an 'empire of wealth,' he noted the importance of that canal. 

The Erie Canal ... turned New York into the greatest boomtown the world has ever known. Manhattan's population grew to 202,000 in 1830, 313,000 in 1840, 516,000 in 1850, and 814,000 in 1860. ... In 1800 about 9 percent of the country's exports passed through the port of New York. By 1860 it was 62 percent, as the city became what the Boston poet and physician Oliver Wendell Holmes (the father of the Supreme Court justice) rather grumpily described as 'that tongue that is licking up the cream of commerce and finance of a continent.' 

These figures are for Manhattan - the surrounding parts of what is now New York City were growing as well. This explosion was all due to the Erie Canal. Before the canal, it had taken three weeks at a cost of $120 to move a ton of flour from Buffalo to New York City. After the canal's construction, it took eight days and cost $6. Gordon remarked that, before the canal was even completed, 'the Times of London saw it coming, writing that year [1822] that the canal would make New York City the 'London of the New World.' The Times was right. It was the Erie Canal that gave the Empire State its commercial empire and made New York the nation's imperial city. That was when the position of New York as an economic powerhouse was first firmly established, and the title has yet to be relinquished. " 

- Douglas Wilson 
Excerpts from 'Five Cities That Ruled The World'

IMHO, for our own city Nagpur to become a Tier I city in the nation MIHAN project will be it. Let us all contribute in our own ways towards making MIHAN successful. 

"NAGPUR - A GLOBAL CITY BY 2020"

Jai Nagpur - Jai Hind 

First get together of NF @ Nagpur

Post by: Rahul.Bagdia@pManifold.com

The first formal Get Together of Nagpur First took place on Saturday April 17th from 5:30 pm onwards. There were 12 members present during the call including one of founders, Dinesh Jain who participated thru Skype.

It was great to know the details of initiation by so many NF founding members to make time for actively championing the issues of their city and joining hands for finding solution instead of criticizing, blaming and/or passing the buck to the government.

The clear action items laid out for NF reflect the high level thinking and efforts that have gone in formalizing this platform. Now the base foundation being kept, its time for building over it and sustaining it. Best participation would be if we can align the cause identified by NF in our businesses and take responsibility for them.

Let us use this blog thread to discuss the meeting notes for this first get together and more importantly what role WE all (each one of us) could play.

1. There is work going on to make Nagpur as sister city to 3 International cities. It would be great if a clear charter and check list of this could be created and posted on website, so that we localites can start filling the checklist items and then with a full fledge back-end supported project, we approach required agencies. Mr. Dinesh Jain could initiate this white paper and we will all support.

2. Mihan needs a boost from us too. One way suggested was good national/global enterprises can start operating from MIHAN. But what is needed to attract these agencies to MIHAN? I tend to believe that there is huge information gap in this space. There is a need for a serious gap identification in this regard and host a good information portal for MIHAN. Local MBA and Engineering schools talents could be engaged to build this information base, provided it could be monetized.

3. Similar feasibility analysis needs to be done for bringing big projects like Boeing and FedEx @ MIHAN.

pManifold Business Solutions (www.pmanifold.com) can start looking in to support items 2 & 3, if NF can help with linkages to build revenue model for this consulting engagement.

Similarly there were other good ideas like to start an incubation center out of VNIT, starting orange food processing plants and many others. What needs to be done is putting a short description of these projects and build over them to collect more like minded people to get momentum on them. Dinesh put it rightly that NF needs more champions for a cause and we could be doing it collaboratively.

It is good to take a pause and think what stops an IDEA to become REAL. As Dinesh told one gets  limited to pull any big effort all by himself, we all face similar constraints to go out of our own scope of work and our own fear of how much work it might involve and if we could get support. Most time we end up doing merry go round discussions trying to get information or support in the form of linkages and partnerships. May be even putting up a white paper by itself is a daunting task to evade many of us. So how could collaboratively and in an organized fashion, we can achieve results by hitting small milestones spread between many? I don't have an answer, but slowly at pManifold we have started realizing that this type of effort is very much needed and remain common to success of most projects. "Effective Collaboration" is what we need to figure out how to achieve at NF. Regular participation through focused and well organized (in terms of follow-up) blogging will be the first step. Lets make small efforts to share our NF related ideas in this blog in a meaningful way to be used by itself as a repository and credentials of our work together.

Post by: Rahul.Bagdia@pManifold.com

Vidharbha State

A couple of email chains last few weeks made me curious. Specially the one where it was reported that Sangli got a better deal over Nagpur for maintaining its Tigers. Ye, I did not even know Sangli had Tigers!

Anyhow, the question worth pondering over is, whether a separate Vidharbha is a solution for these kind of issues.

Is it about time?

You can vote on the left rail of this blog. There are three choices.

Please add your comments below this post if you have any ideas/thoughts/opinion on this issue.

Treasure Hunt

I am a unique educational institution, one of it's kind, in the entire nation. I provide Bachelor's degree to tomorrow's brave young men who take on serving one of the most adventurous fields in modern society. I started in as early as 1950 and am a peerless gem in your city's crown.

Who am I?

Open Thread

Howz everyone doing? It's been a while since someone said something. Since we all Nagpuris cannot physically meet, I thought, why not open up this blog (for once) to the entire forum.

As in, by calling it an Open Thread, I, a co-editor, for this blog, won't say much, but instead all of us on the forum will have a chance to speak out.

And you can pick up anything under the sun, or from your hat. From IPL, to the latest happenings in Nagpur, to issues facing India, or anything you feel is important and needs visibility.

Please use the comment section under this post to have your views spelt out. If this "Open Thread" experiment is successful, we'll make it more frequent. So let's give it a shot. What say you?

Treasure Hunt

"I am the only big Park in East of the city. I hosted the Indian National Congress's meeting in 1955. I also gave Nagpur it's first swimming pool in early 50s. Today I own a musical fountain too. Who am I?"


Note: Please respond on comment section of this post instead of email/yahoogroup. Thanks.

Mr. Ashok Easwaran

Folks, we are pleased to have a remarkable Nagpuri amongst us at Nagpur First - Mr. Ashok Easwaran.

Mr Easwaran is currently working as Editor of an Indian American weekly published from Chicago and also writes for the Indo-Asian News Service.

Mr. Easwaran is a true blue Nagpuri, with core Nagpuri sensibilities. He grew up in Nagpur and did his education in SFS school,G.S College and PG in Management and Journalism from Nagpur University.

His career as a Journalist associated him with various renowned media houses like Indian Expresss, The Daily and Deccan Herald in Mumbai. Of course he is proud of the fact that the foundation of his illustrous career was laid in his home town, Nagpur, where he started it all at The Hitvada under veteran journalists Mr M Y Bodhankar and the late Mr G T Parande.

He worked with the South Asia bureau of India Abroad at New Delhi before moving to Houston and later to Chicago.

He has been kind enough to grant us his permission to publish one of his article on our blog. Since getting the format right with PDF on blog was tough, I thought it would be prudent to upload the article on googlesites. This would do more justice to it, than me trying to format and present it on the blog.

I am sure you all will enjoy!

http://sites.google.com/site/nagpur1st/mr-ashok-easwaran-article-1