Tarmac to Towers: A window into India's infra picture
Step outside and look around — you probably see roads, buildings, power lines, and the metro, all seamlessly woven into daily life. But take a moment, and you’ll realise that everything functions because of the infrastructure that supports it. Pratap Padode’s new book, Tarmac to Towers: The India Infrastructure Story, explores this in an insightful and informative manner. A CA by training, he co-founded Dalal Street Journal, India’s best-selling equity magazine, and shifted from market analysis to championing infrastructure. Now, as the force behind the FIRST Construction Council, he drives innovation in construction and urban development. After attending an event in the city, he spoke to CE about his book, challenges in infrastructure, and more.
Excerpts
What is your book about?
My book is about nation-building in India over the last 25 years. It’s simple — when the government spends ₹1 on infrastructure, it adds ₹3.5 to our GDP. Twenty-five years ago, we started investing in infrastructure because we understood how this will help the country. Essentially, nothing is so fundamental to the health of a nation as its infrastructure — the foundation of all economic activity. My book analyses the hits and misses apart from presenting the narrative behind the numbers. It looks to the future with informed and insightful policy recommendations.
Do you think schools should introduce students to nation-building, infrastructure related concepts?
Absolutely. In fact, I think nation-building should be a subject, which would definitely encompass infrastructure. But this shouldn’t be limited to physical infrastructure; it should also include finance and concepts that will help them gain an understanding of the country and the real world out there. In school, we were just taught about some great people, made to memorise some dates and achievements…that was it. But what did they really contribute? How did things really change? Now, it is time to really integrate nation-building into our curricula.
What are the three biggest infrastructural challenges that India faces today?
The first is corruption; they should appoint all public sector officials based on merit. The second is skill; our education system is based on rote learning. Education needs to be application based, and so I suggest that people need to get vocational training. In fact, companies need to be given some sort of tax break if they are spending money on training. The third is quality of infrastructure; people want to construct fast, but when a tunnel collapses, people perish and our tax money goes to waste too.
In Chapter 3, Why Aren’t We There Yet, I point out the deficits, such as the pending cases in court, insufficient judges, delay in giving clearances, and so on. But I will note that states like Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and Gujarat have been slightly ahead of the curve in terms of ease of doing business. These states are far more proactive when a new entrepreneur wants to set up a factory or a global capability centre or data centre.
But we have made strides — in the last decade, our national highways have grown from 91,287 km to 146,145 km, we have gone from having 74 airports to 148, our solar generation capacity has risen from 2.63 GW to 66.78 GW, and from around 350 startups, we now have over 90,000 of them. It is also worth mentioning that the Indian stock market capitalisation has increased from about $1.6 trillion to $3.9 trillion.
In your 26 years in the infrastructure sector, what are the key things you’ve learned?
I call them the three Ps — patience, project management, and public-private partnership. You need patience in this sector because progress doesn’t happen overnight. What we must focus on is good project management. In any infrastructure project that involves both the government and the private sector together, there is a better buy-in — neither is it something imposed by the government nor is a private player trying to reap a lot of profit out of it.
How will a layperson benefit from reading Tarmac to Towers?
Every Indian who wants to contribute to nation-building should read the book. And I’m not saying this just because I’ve written the book — you see, we are at a very crucial point in time, when our under-25s make up around 60% of the population. We are in an era where China’s population is growing old. We are growing larger and larger in terms of GDP, and are leveraging the power of AI.