World's largest rooftop solar power plant inaugurated in Punjab

The investment in this sector has steeply gone up from Rs 82 crore in 2012 to Rs 10,000 crore now with an employment potential of 12,500 jobs

World’s largest single rooftop solar power plant of 11.5 Mw capacity was inaugurated in Beas near Amritsar in Punjab on Tuesday. Spread at a single rooftop stretch of 42 acre at Dera Baba Jaimal, the project was synchronised earlier this year.

According to Wikipedia,the Mandalay Bay Resort Convention Centre, Las Vegas in the United States is next biggest solar photovoltic power station in the world having 6.4 megawatts (Mw) capacity. The EPC contractors for the project were Tata Power and Larsen and Toubro.

In addition to single largest rooftop solar power plant, seven rooftop solar power plants of 8Mw capacity were also inaugurated in Beas Dera campus making this place the highest single campus generating solar power of 19.5 Mw at multiple rooftops in the country, informed a senior official from Punjab Energy Development Agency (PEDA).

Punjab is generating 470 Mw of solar power and with projects of 500 Mw in the pipeline, the state would be able to generate solar power of close to 1,000 Mw by the end of FY 2016-17.

New & Renewable Energy Resources Minister of Punjab Bikram Singh Majithia said this project would generate clean and green energy sufficient to power approximately 8,000 homes. He pointed out that GoI has set a target of power generation of 40,000 Mw from different resources of renewable energy to be achieved by 2022 and this project would be a role model to encourage other states to replicate such large rooftops on the building/sheds.

The investment in this sector has steeply gone up from Rs 82 crore in 2012 to nearly Rs 10,000 crore now with an employment potential of 12,500 jobs, he said. Punjab would achieve a target of 2552 MW of renewable energy generation by 2022, he added.

He said Punjab would achieve a target of 2552 MW of renewable energy generation by 2022.Solar projects have been executed on BOO (built-operate-own) basis and PEDA has entered into 25 year power purchase agreements with the private players.

article source: Business Standard / May 18' 2016

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Total addressable travel market in India will be $40 billion by 2020: Nathan Blecharczyk, co-founder, Airbnb

New Delhi: World's largest marketplace for accommodation Airbnb sees India as a $40 billion travel market by 2020. Airbnb relies on its USP of offering a local experience to guests, different from staying in a hotel, which Nathan Blecharczyk, co-founder of Airbnb, described as 'mass produced and commoditised'. The 2008 startup — funded by Y Combinator, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners and others — operates in 191countries with a staff of just 2,000. In April, it entered into a strategic partnership with the Times Group, publishers of this paper, to expand its footprint in India and create a local experience. In an interview to ET, Blecharczyk, one of the three co-founders of Airbnb, discussed Airbnb's impact on the market, how it copes with regulatory challenges, and plans to grow. Excerpts...

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What does Airbnb cater to? Is it travel, short term stay, or both? How do you define it?

Airbnb is great for any accommodation you want to book up to three months. If you are doing internship over summer, or just travelling as a tourist, you might want to check it out. The average stay at Airbnb property is 4-5 days.

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For 4-5 days, it's a bit of a hassle to go into an unbranded, unknown place. How does that compare with hotel stay?

It's very transparent. Paris is our top city with 70,000 homes on the platform, followed by New York and London. Airbnb is away for visitors to live like locals. You are in a local neighbourhood — you can stay in tree houses, igloos, castles, houseboats, heritage homes, etc. It is a totally different feeling compared to a hotel. Hotel experience is very mass produced, commoditised. But travel is about local experiences and hotel may not be the best option.

The aggregator model has not gone down well with regulators in several countries. Even cab aggregator Uber has had frequent problems. In Berlin and other markets you have faced headwinds. How do you see your business in India?

The Airbnb model has come on to people's radars rather suddenly. Obviously, none of the existing policies contemplated such a thing is possible. Governments are trying to figure out what is this new model. And how should existing rules apply. There's an appreciation that new rules need to be created and when that happens we have seen very favourable rules. In 30 or so cities and countries, favourable home share laws have been passed, like in France, UK, Portugal, Netherlands. Even the India government has a favourable disposition to this. Our stance as a company is to try to have conversations with local authorities. For instance, there are issues like tax that come up. We can add value here. We are already handling money. We do that in many cities. Once we get into these dialogues, it becomes constructive.

The platform has been used in India for some time now. What has been the response?

India is a company priority now. There are 18000 homes in India on Airbnb in 100 cities and that number has grown 115% in the last year, and on the travellers' side, we have seen 185% increase in travellers from India going abroad. We think there's a rising tide here, the market is growing and it's predicted by 2020, the total addressable travel market in India will be $40 billion. We don't grow by giving discounts, but primarily by word of mouth.

How this financial expert turned to religious tourism for passion

A decade or two ago, most travels were either to relatives places or religious trips. Today, the travel bug bites people of different demographics: you have youngsters taking a year off to go backpacking in Europe, women savouring independence and courage on the road without their male counterparts, and those solo travellers, seeking to find themselves as they push their personal boundaries.

However, the dynamics for religious travel hasn’t changed. It has been touted to be an $80 billion market. It is to disseminate information on this very segment that Rachna Gulati started the web platform myholytour in October 2014.

Myholytour brings together content, information and online and offline bookings and customisations of all religious trips and destinations on one platform. Currently, the website displays information of close to 600 religious places across all the religions.

Religion is something that Rachna is unabashedly passionate about. So despite putting in 18 years into working in finance, it was easy enough to answer the calling to take up religious tourism.

Rachna received a REX global fellowship and the Karmaveer Chakra.

Building the brand

During her search, Rachna found FICCI to be very helpful, as it built different religions based circuit. Wanting to build a brand of her own, Rachna decided to tie up with travel agencies like Amadeus and Galileo.

The main hurdle was to build the website as there were not too many people who could do it. The website involved various integrations relating to the APIs, and the web developers asked for hefty amounts.

Rachna spent 20 months networking with unknown people who were well established in the industry and convinced them about her faith in sailing this product. “I nevertheless managed to meet all major players in person and presented the product,” says 41-year-old Rachna.

Rachna found it challenging to get tie-ups and it took her seven months of hard search to find the right blend of people for her company.

The market

Globally, the travel and tourism market is believed to be one of the largest employment generators in the world. It is believed to generate close to 9.4 per cent of the world GDP. The number of players in the online booking and information dissemination space are fast growing.

In fact, myholytour faces most of the competition from well-funded and deeply pocketedplayers like MakeMyTrip, Cox and Kings and even HolidayIQ, which provides information. In fact, according to the different reports by MakeMyTrip, has seen over 30 per cent growth in the segment and the religious travel space is in fact believed to be five per cent of its leisure travel revenue. Not only do these players have deeper pockets, they also have stronger tie-ups and the ability to provide more discounts.

Also, when it comes to booking online, customers would rather prefer to book via a recognised and well-established tour operator. Myholytour also faces stiff competition from other local tour operators like Nirmal Travels, Asian Travels, and Radheshyam Travels.

The company started its operations only early this year after beta testing. Currently bootstrapped, myholytours wants to build a strong brand in the space of religious tourism. The global Alexa ranking of the side is 7,639,497 and gets over 150 page views. The team has also partnered with ixigo for religious tours. According to the team, they have about 1,600 clicks from February to April. While the tours are yet to start, they have had over 100 enquiries since its launch.

“We hope to tie up with the Ministry Tourism and various state tourism boards in terms of quality service in organising religious tours. We want to promote religious destinations that are less known of,” says Rachna.