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Beware the Waking Dragon
The transit elevated bus TEB-1 is on road test in Qinhuangdao, North China’s Hebei Province, Aug 2, 2016. China’s home-made transit elevated bus, TEB-1, conducted a road test running Tuesday.
The 22-meter-long, 7.8-meter-wide and 4.8-meter-high TEB-1 can carry up to 300 passengers. The passenger compartment of this futuristic public bus rises far above other vehicles on the road, allowing cars to pass underneath. [
Source: Road test for homegrown transit elevated bus[1]| Innovation
The former deputy chief of China’s Beijing Zoo – who claimed his 8 million yuan (about HK$10 million) fortune was earned from part-time jobs, including working as a taxi driver – was sentenced to life imprisonment by a Beijing court this morning.
The Beijing Second Intermediate People’s Court found Xiao Shaoxiang guilty of corruption, including taking bribes and “possessing huge assets of unknown origin”.
All his personal property would be confiscated, the Beijing-based newspaper, Mirror, reported on its official mainland microblogging Weibo website.
Prosecutors said six million yuan in cash, paintings and gold bullion from unknown sources were found in Xiao’s apartment – a cache worth a total of 8 million yuan, the court said during his trial in August.
He was charged with accepting bribes totalling more than 140 million yuan.
Xiao, 59, had denied all the charges during the trial.
He had defended himself by claiming that he had earned the money from moonlighting as an unlicensed cab driver after work at the zoo from 1991 to 1994.
Centre has released Rs 5,160 crore to various states for implementation of pollution abatement works in rivers, Parliament was informed on Monday.
Minister of water resources, river development and ganga rejuvenation Uma Bharti said in Rajya Sabha that Rs 5,159.81 crore has been released by the Centre to states for implementation of pollution abatement works and a sewage treatment capacity of about 5,005 million litres per day has been created so far under NRCP and NGRBA programmes.
National River Conservation Plan (NRCP) and National Ganga River Basin Authority (NGRBA) programme cover polluted stretches of 42 rivers spread over 21 states at a sanctioned cost of Rs 11,362.85 crore.
To another question, the minister said conservation of rivers is an ongoing process and cleaning of Ganga and other rivers is taking time mainly due to the “large gap between sewage generation and availability of sewage treatment capacity…”
She said it is the responsibility of the state governments and local bodies concerned to set up proper facility for collection and treatment of sewage generated and ensuring that it is not discharged into the rivers.
The new NDA-government has set up an Integrated Ganga Conservation Mission — ‘Namami Gange’ for for rejuvenation of Ganga and its tributaries.
via Rs 5,160cr given to states to clean rivers – The Times of India.
FT: “Phanindra Sama remembers only too clearly the inspiration behind his business. “RedBus was started because of a personal pain point,” he says. “I couldn’t get a bus ticket.”
It was October 2005 and Mr Sama, who is known to everyone in his company simply as “Phani”, was heading home to celebrate Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights. The journey involved a trip from Bangalore to his parents’ home near Hyderabad, nearly 600km to the north.
“I went to this travel agent to book a ticket. He made a few phone calls to the bus operators and told me there were no seats,” says Mr Sama. He tried four more agents. All called a couple of bus companies, but none could find a seat. Even more frustrating, all of the agents told him there might be a ticket out there – they just couldn’t locate it.
Mr Sama was stuck. “I am there, all flustered, staying in my flat,” he says of the long holiday weekend that followed. “I woke up the next day, and all of my friends were not there because they had gone home. It really pained me.”
An electronics engineer by training and working for Texas Instruments, he decided to do something about it. The result was RedBus, India’s leading bus ticketing service, which links thousands of unconnected bus operators and ticket agents, and sold more than 7.5m tickets last year.
Mr Sama’s entrepreneurial journey required figuring out India’s vast but fragmented $3bn bus system, which is dominated by small and often unreliable operators. Buses often leave from anonymous storefronts and frequently travel overnight. While some are upmarket, modern vehicles with wireless internet and air conditioning, most offer much more basic features.
When Mr Sama entered the industry, fast economic growth and urbanisation had vastly increased demand for travel. But most people couldn’t afford to fly and India’s celebrated train system struggled to cope with rising demand.
A lesson in listening
Phanindra Sama says being an entrepreneur has taught him a lot about listening. Speaking of the bus operators who have received bad reviews on RedBus, he says: “You get these calls from people saying: ‘I’ve been in the industry for 10 years and suddenly you come and rate me as a bad operator. What about my reputation?’ ”
“I think a lot of entrepreneurs probably don’t make time. If somebody says, ‘I want to talk to you’, they don’t make time,” he says. “We make time because that is very important for us.”
It is a lesson he has picked up not only from patiently listening to angry customers but also from reading management theory.
“There is a common theme in all those books. They say make space for others,” he explains. “I have dreams and passions, [but] everybody in the team also has their own dreams and passions. So if I have to get the best progress that we want, it can’t just be me standing there and having everybody do what I want.”
Even so, Mr Sama found India’s bus users were treated shabbily, with scant information on prices or bus companies. “This whole industry was very unregulated,” he says – a situation he admits has barely changed in the years since the company’s launch.
Despite holding down a day job, Mr Sama spent his weekends working out how to improve matters and even convinced his two flatmates to join him. Just under a year later, the trio had quit their jobs and were preparing to launch the RedBus website, along with two other software packages linking India’s disparate travel agents and bus companies.
The site has since become both popular and profitable, with revenues of Rs6bn ($110m) last year. It has also won fresh funding from the likes of Inventus Capital and Helion Venture Partners, investors attracted by an Indian intercity bus industry with revenues projected to grow to about $8bn over the next four years.”
continuously updated blog about China & India
continuously updated blog about China & India
continuously updated blog about China & India
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 