Abstract
Public service infrastructure is typically characterized as being mostly highly capital intensive, often requiring lumpy investments, and needing long gestation periods. Inefficient service operations of the infrastructure utilities not just result in unwarranted financial logjams, but the consequences also manifest into operational technical shortcomings and inefficiencies, making the infrastructure unworthy of facing disaster situations. If such inefficiencies persist in the entire sectors, then the planners, managers, and administrators become busy in focusing on providing day-to-day services, and the focus shifts away from disaster preparedness. Sector inefficiencies also contribute to constricted financial resources to recover and rebuild the infrastructure affected by disaster. With disasters presenting potentially severe impacts on public service utilities, ensuring that these services are efficient at their operational and financial levels can minimize the associated risks to a significant extent. Efficiency benchmarking accounts for operational, economic and environmental stability of utilities by reforming their operations in line with best practices, providing them an opportunity to optimize their resources, ensuring cost minimization and generating internal savings, thereby making these utilities financially stable to tackle the upcoming disasters. This chapter provides an insight on the need to integrate efficiency benchmarking frameworks in the curricula and be a part of every public service utility policy documents as a component of disaster risk management strategy. The study provides inferences drawn from case studies of various public service infrastructure sectors such as electricity, irrigation, water supply and telecommunication, discussing the extent of inefficiencies prevailing in each sector and the extent of savings possible if inefficiencies are mitigated. The chapter further discusses the importance to integrate benchmarking tools as a part of disaster education curriculum to provide future engineers with guidelines to design and operate utilities in an effective way to ensure sustenance and disaster preparedness in the sectors.
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Notes
- 1.
Out of US$2.5 trillion economic losses from disasters so far this century, 70% relate to floods and droughts and they account for almost 90% of the 1,000 most disastrous events since 1990 (UN Water 2015).
- 2.
The percentage of water losses which are expressed in terms of NRW (non-revenue water) in Indian cities is very large and in the range 33–42% (IBNET 2017), 12–60% (ADB 2007), while other researchers have found mean NRW nearly 49.5% (Kulshrestha and Vishwakarma 2013), a value too high when compared with average NRWs of 3.75% in Singapore, 12.77% in USA and 10.3% in Australia (IBNET 2017).
- 3.
It has been estimated that 61% of the firms in India suffer above 10% shortfall in production due to power cuts, 13% of firms suffer 2–5% shortfall in production, and only 14% of firms suffer less than 2% production losses (energeticaindia 2013).
- 4.
Building resilience of infrastructure to recurrent disasters due to climate change is an integral part of sustainable development and climate change adaptation. Resilience needs to be built in planning, design as well as operational stage of electricity infrastructure (PGCIL 2015).
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Amulya, S., Kulshrestha, M., Kulshrestha, S. (2020). Need for Inclusion of Efficiency Benchmarking Framework as a Part of Disaster Education: Case of Public Service Infrastructure Utilities. In: Pal, I., von Meding, J., Shrestha, S., Ahmed, I., Gajendran, T. (eds) An Interdisciplinary Approach for Disaster Resilience and Sustainability. MRDRRE 2017. Disaster Risk Reduction. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9527-8_22
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