What are the major aspects of the so called Quality Infrastructure Investment (QII) promoted by Japan? While analyzing the QII collaboration between India and Japan, discuss how it can help the infrastructure policy making in the country.

The Quality Infrastructure Investment, initiated by Japan has contributed heavily towards current growth and prosperity of Asia. Some of the major aspects of this Quality Infrastructure Investment are:

• Its vision is that along with infrastructure development, the infrastructure should also be easy to use, safe, disaster-resilient and of high quality.
• It ensures that the development plans do not conflict with the national and regional strategies for growth and development.
• Infrastructure must be inclusive in the sense that it must connect towns, villages and countries and yield to their growth too.
• It is also ensured that infrastructure development must be in harmony with the environmental needs, community needs and livelihood of people living in the region.
• Infrastructure is to be made cost-effective and envisage the needs of the future.
• Infrastructure development should also increase employment of the local people and facilitate technology transfer.
• For achieving all of the above, a set of rules and standards for infrastructure development must be formulated at the planning stage.

The combination of Japan’s capital, innovation and technology and India’s human resources and economic oppurtunities under QII can develop the following of India:

• They can work together to combat global challenges like climate change, terrorism, implementation of reforms of the UN and maintaining rule based international order.
• The infrastructure development can be extended to space, clean energy, smart cities, biotechnology, smart cities,, pharmaceuticals and ICT.

The Delhi metro is a classic example of how Japan’s ODA loans have helped India build the Delhi metro. The problems it could solve was that of traffic congestion due to a large number of vehicles in the streets, it adopted sufficient safety measures for making commuting easy at any time of the day. It was made with sufficient attention on environment as it uses less of electricity and carbon emission is also almost negligible, using the Japanese high-tech brake system.

Topics: GS-III: Infrastructure Energy Sector