【2023 SyDE 産官学協働研修

実施報告】2023.6.1~2023.6.30

Thota Sai Durga Malleswar, a PhD student in the Department of Earth Science and the SyDE
program, has undertaken an internship offered by Nippon Koei, Japan, under the industrygovernment-academia collaborative training. My research field is specific to rural planning,and my interest is mainly on patterns of rural settlements and internal migration. My previous
work is dedicated to revealing the hidden problems that control the functioning of ruralregions. Rural regions are known for long travel distances to facilities, low population, andpoverty. Rural planning is essential in understanding rural area’s relationship with nearby
towns and cities. The definition of a developed rural area is that all its residents are satisfied
with the accessibility to daily necessities and planning literature helps to achieve this goal byidentifying the problem in functioning of settlements. I chose NK because of its experience inregional development projects and planning. Nippon Koei (NK) is a Japanese Engineering
consultancy giant that takes over projects in more than 150 countries. I was welcomed in the"Western Dedicated Freight Corridor (WDFC)" project, a 1,506 km long railway line
construction and the study area and track alignment can be seen in the map below.

Black line shows the track allignmnet and Yellow pins show the rehabilitated households
This project helps to increase freight railways and reduce carbon emissions. Construction ofthis track also allows the rural villages to develop a regional economy. For this project, 23,537
households were rehabilitated to other regions. As my background is in Human Geography, I
chose to study the migration patterns and spatial distribution of rehabilitated residents. Inthis study, we want to check the economic benefit of the strategy used by the company torehabilitate the residents. The company collected the data using an individual survey which isrich in information. This internship was a collaboration between Tohoku University andNippon Koei to conduct a study using the abovementioned dataset. We used attributes likeincome, type of occupation, accessibility measures, and loan-debt situation of rehabilitatedresidents. We know it is difficult for farmers to relocate to a new place as their source ofincome depends on location. Our study results show that the strategy used for laying the track
was beneficial to the rehabilitated residents. This means the highest percentage ofrehabilitation occurred in districts with low income in agriculture and vice versa.
During this time, I faced various challenges and learned new skills useful for my academic
career. One of the challenges is geocoding for each of the 23,537 individual households andtechnical skills like data visualization and software TILOS and Primavera, which are used forplanning and progress monitoring of mega projects. I've got to learn the steps involved in thepreliminary stages of such mega projects, which demand a lot of planning expertise from social
sciences background. I've got the opportunity to discuss my study at the office with theenvironmental department and have field experience in conducting the face-to-faceinterviews about the topics of income inequalities, internal migration, and employment, whichwere extremely useful for my upcoming doctoral study. After interacting with the social
experts at NK, I've got a new perspective on rural areas and their problems. This study helped
me understand more about the spatial variation in the distribution of income sectors in rural
areas from the discussion with the environmental department. I benefitted from theperspective of both technical and networking from this experience and significantly improved
my literature knowledge on regional planning which in turn will help my doctoral researchand thesis.
Thota Sai Durga Malleswar（理学研究科 地学専攻 D2）

Nippon Koei, India office