Sunday, December 2, 2007

E2K - - is this a reality?

In Thomas Friedman's words E2K stands "for all the energy programming and monitoring that thousands of global companies are going to be undertaking in the early 21st century to either become carbon neutral or far more energy efficient than they are today. India is poised to get a lot of this work."

As Indian IT companies are begining to scratch the surface of this wave, what is the Indian Government doing?

This energy / global warming crisis is not just a problem for the developed nations but for every oil dependent nation in the world. (Although only time can tell how well the Brazil's ethanol experiment will form the solution for such oil independency).

But change is in the air!!!!

About one-sixth of the world's population is begining to face a new energy code.

Yes! for the first time in India's history there is a national energy rating system for buildings. Apart from the LEED-India movement, this energy movement from the energy and resource institute of India (TERI) is about to bring a whole lot of change in the Indian Construction industry.

As a result of this, the brain-powered IT industry in India is begining to understand not only the global need for such energy measures but also the local need. It is going to be a WIN-WIN for everybody - a nice boost for the booming construction industry in India.

It's ironic that my dad predicted such boom roughly eleven years ago.

Once I got out of high school, following the mob, I started preparing for entrance exams to get into engineering schools (after realizing rather lately that the entrance exams for architecture schools had already been conducted - - this is where I think... awareness is important... in future every school should have a "career corner" where they can expose the kids to the wide range of opportunities India could offer them... anyways for now this is added to my list of ideas to implement in India :-)).

Indian education system favors caste based allocations to access to education. What does this mean? The assumption being the lower castes are socially challenged to access and means to education compared to their higher caste counterparts. So the government (atleast my state cleverly did this a long time ago - - many states are now going through this huge caste challenge!) reserves certain allocations based on caste. For one to be qualified to get into a good school for education, his/her educational merits (high scores in test etc) is only considered second to their caste heirarchy. So me being in the so called Forward Caste (even though I was from an average Inidan middle class...) am required to score really high in all my exams to get into a decent school and study what I like to study.

Guess what! I some how managed to do that! Pumped up... since I could not get into architecture school, I was good at computers and India then was getting ready to solve the world's Y2K problem -- I was motivated to get into an engineering degree focused on computer science. I got into a decent school for my engineering after a wait for few months. Only during your second year in engineering one decides which specialization he/she will opt for! I was hoping to get into Computer Science. Then came the reality!!

I started slowly hearing that since me being a Forward Caste student will not be able to pursue Computer science and will only be able to pursue the lowest in preference - - CIVIL ENGINEERING. I was rather hopeless. Understanding my state of despair, my dad did some research... again this was 11 years ago... and he predicted that by the time I graduate India will be in need of Infrastructure. He started feeding me news after news on this subject... I slowly started adapting to the notion that CIVIL Engineering is my future and boldly opted for CIVIL Engineering at the end of the first year for all my three preference choices.

Begining of the second year, to my surprise I came to know, that my scores where enough to garner Computer science. Nonetheless, I was focused to learning on how to shape India's future infrastructure! I am glad now that I followed my dad's instincts!

Anyways long story short.... Indian infrastructure boom is a reality and so is the E2K wave!

Lets learn to surf this new wave!