The State of Infrastructure in India

Traditionally, the government has been solely responsible for developing the country's infrastructure. But its investment was found to be inadequate, and today the private sector — both on its own and in joint partnership with the public sector — has begun to play a very important role in infrastructure development.

A majority of India's people live in rural areas, and here the picture is sobering. Despite all the technical progress in the world, rural women still use bio-fuels such as crop residues, dung and fuel wood to meet their energy needs, and walk long distances to fetch fuel, water and other basic necessities. The 2001 Census showed that in rural India:

• only 56 per cent of households had an electricity connection, while 43 per cent still used kerosene;
• about 90 per cent of rural households used bio-fuels for cooking;
• tap-water availability was limited to only 24 per cent of rural households, and about 76 per cent of people drank water from open sources such as wells, tanks, ponds, lakes, rivers and canals; and
• access to improved sanitation in rural areas was only 20 per cent.

Table 8.1 sets the state of some infrastructure in India against that of a few other countries.

Table 8.1 — Some Infrastructure in India and other Countries

Source: World Development Indicators, World Bank. (*) refers to Gross Capital Formation.

Although it is widely understood that infrastructure is the foundation of development, India is yet to wake up fully to the call: it invests only about 5 per cent of its GDP on infrastructure, far below China and Indonesia. Some economists project that India will become the world's third-biggest economy in a few decades — but for that to happen it will have to raise its infrastructure investment sharply. …