India's rise in recent years is a most prominent development in the world economy. India has re-emerged as one of the fastest growing economies in the world. India could unleash its full potentials, provided it improves the infrastructure facilities, which are at present not sufficient to meet the growing demand of the economy.

India, while stepping up public investment in infrastructure, has been actively engaged in involving private sector to meet the growing demand.

The Indian Railways will award contracts worth Rs 10,000 crore by the end of this year to kick start one of India's most ambitious infrastructure projects to build dedicated freight corridors to connect north India with Mumbai and West Bengal.

The freight corridor is the backbone of a $90 billion project to build an industrial corridor between Delhi and Mumbai with a series of industrial parks, airports, power plants and new townships. The Eastern freight corridor would ease movement of coal and other commodities to the north, the Delhi-Mumbai route would facilitate container movement. Busy ports such as Kandla, Pipavav and Mundra would benefit from the western corridor.

The railways have tied up Japanese funding of Rs 30,000 crore for the 1,490-km western corridor, while the World Bank is expected to lend about $2.4 billion for the 1,800-km eastern corridor that would connect Ludhiana in Punjab to Dankuni in West Bengal. Contracts would be awarded for the first phase of the Rs 77,000 crore freight corridor project, that will build new tracks to transport containers and commodities at maximum speeds of 100 km an hour, reducing travel time by a third.

The Rs 77,000 crore dedicated freight corridor project, scheduled to be built by 2016/17, is expected to ease infrastructure bottlenecks and boost industrial development and international trade as existing railway lines in these regions are running up to 50% more than the designed capacity.

Besides civil engineering contracts, DFCCIL also plans to award contracts of about Rs 1,500 crore by mid 2012 for electrification and signalling works for the 1st phase of Eastern Corridor. For the Western Corridor, it may award contract worth Rs 4500 crore by the end of the next fiscal year.

We in Reliability Centre India will provide the expertise to engineer the Reliability, Availability, Maintainability, Safety (RAMS) aspects of the systems that have to be inducted into this infrastructure project. The RAMS activities for the project will be guided by the International Railway Standard IEC 62278 and EN 5012X standards.

India needs massive investment in power sector because there is a large demand-supply gap. All India average energy shortfall of 7% and peak demand shortfall of 12%. There is a total investment opportunity of US $ 200 billion over a 7 year horizon. There are opportunities in generation, transmission, and distribution of energy through participation of the private investor.

Majority of Generation, Transmission, and Distribution capacities are either with the public sector companies or with the State Electricity Boards. Private sector participation is increasing especially in Generation and Distribution.

The government has permitted 100% FDI, which is outlined in the Electricity Act 2003 and National Electricity Policy 2005. There is an incentive to have the benefit of income tax holiday for a block of 10 years, waiver of capital goods import duties on mega power projects.

Over 90,000 MW of new generation capacity is required in the next 7 years. Over 150,000 MW of hydel power is yet to be tapped. India is now to going to invest in Nuclear Power Stations too.

Reliability Centre India provides the Reliability, Quality and Safety engineering services in the power sector as per the guidelines issued by the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission and the State Electricity Commissions.

The civil aviation traffic in India is growing at rate more than 20% for the last two years. The civil aviation infrastructure in India needs improvement to cater for the increasing needs of traffic in terms of aircraft movement, passenger and cargo.

India has 125 airports, of these 11 are designated as international airports. Currently all airports are owned and operated by Airports Authority of India (AAI). The government aims to attract private investment in aviation infrastructure and new airports are being built by the private consortia, such as those in New Delhi and Mumbai.

The AAI has drawn an action plan to develop and modenise 35 non-metro airports in India, besides the development of the airports in the major metros. Overall, this requires an investment of nearly US $9302 million.

The main functions in the development will include construction, modification, and management of passenger terminals, development and management of cargo terminals, development and maintenance of apron infrastructure such as runways, parallel taxiways, aprons, etc, provision of communication, navigation and surveillance aids, provision of air traffic services, provision of passenger facilities including security and safety at the terminals.

Reliability Centre India provides the engineering solutions to the development and management of airport infrastructure, which can be customised or dovetailed to the specific requirement of any airport.