Journal of Infrastructure Development

In developing countries, rapid urbanisation has led to an increase in the demand for transport, aggravating problems of pollution, congestion and accidents. Increasing public transport availability is one way of addressing these problems. In the Indian city of Kolkata, buses cater to a large number of people in the metropolitan area and are run by private operators as well as by the state government. Corporations owned by the state, known as state transport undertakings, operate buses. There is, however, a general complaint that the state-run buses show poor performance in nearly every sphere, including inefficient staff, irregular service, ill-maintained fleet, etc. The objective of this study is to look at the physical, financial and manpower performance of the different state transport corporations to find out whether these corporations operate efficiently. The results indicate that there is underutilisation of fleet, defective employment policy, wrong purchase policy, poor revenue generation, etc. on the part of all the corporations.

Water resources infrastructure ranges from educational and research infrastructure, storage works (surface and underground), hydrological and meteorological stations, irrigation systems, to water infrastructure for eco-tourism. This water resources infrastructure serves the mining, agricultural, urban and rural water needs, the environment, amongst a host of other needs and demands.

Water resources infrastructure is a critical component in the provision of sustainable water resource management and services, for example, for mitigating impacts of climate change and variability, mitigating the variability of the water resource distribution in space and time, climate proofing, energy and food security and for data collection for information and improving the knowledge base.

The purpose of this article is to document the status of water infrastructure development in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region and showcase the efforts and strides that the SADC region has made and taken in achieving a conducive enabling environment for water infrastructure development to facilitate better water resource management.

The article also highlights the challenges faced and the lessons learnt to date pursuant to the provision of water resource infrastructure in the SADC Region. The opinions and conclusions drawn in the article are those of the author.

This study investigates the impact of financial liberalisation on real sector output in Nigeria by adopting the Ordinary Least Square (OLS) modeling technique for the econometric analysis. Pre-estimation tests such as the Stationarity and Cointegration tests were also done. The results show that the variables of interest in the model are cointegrated and that financial liberalisation (proxied by private sector credit) has a negative impact on manufacturing sector, while it has a positive impact on agricultural sector. This implies that credit to private sector was diverted to some unproductive ventures, rather than productive activities. Furthermore, poor infrastructure, high level of corruption, political and economic instability and high cost fund were found to have constrained the contribution of private sector credit to economic development. On the other hand, its positive impact on agriculture shows that there is an improvement in the agricultural sector since the commencement of financial liberalisation. The study concludes that efforts should be geared towards militating against the socioeconomic cum institutional factors that constrained the contribution of private sector credit to manufacturing output growth in Nigeria within the period under review.

Infrastructure is fundamental for any kind of development. Health infrastructure is very essential for quality health output. In this connection, the objective of this study is to explore the health infrastructure available in the state of Odisha and especially in the twin city of Cuttack–Bhubaneswar. It is observed that the health infrastructure available in the state is very poor with large numbers of medical and paramedical posts lying vacant. But the situations in both the cities are quite good because of the private providers. The private hospitals are better service providers than the public hospitals.

Rural roads are built to improve people’s mobility and to enhance access to markets, administrative centres, schools and health posts, and are credited with important socio-economic changes. A less studied aspect is the impact of roads on hydrological resources, as roads interact with existing surface and groundwater flows, redistributing water-related hazards and resources across space with significant consequences on people and their livelihoods. In Ethiopia, the government has embarked on a massive road construction programme over the last decade, mainly to serve the needs of an essentially rural population and agrarian economy. In parallel, the government has also been investing significantly in water harvesting and conservation measures and irrigation to serve the needs of a population whose livelihoods depend heavily on rain-fed agriculture. Based on fieldwork conducted in 2014 in the semi-arid region of Tigray, Ethiopia, this article explores the opportunities and potential for multifunctional infrastructures. We argue that the two distinctive objectives of improving road connectivity and water availability for irrigation are interlinked and can be served by the same infrastructure, which we call multifunctional roads.