6TH International Congress on Technology - Engineering - Kuala Lumpur3 - Malaysia (2018-07-19)

Road Infrastructure And Socio-economic Development

Road infrastructure constitutes one of the important parameters of economic development. The term road generally describes those travelled ways on which goods and services are carried from one destination to another destination. Hence the success of any development programme in rural are depend a lot on the availability of good road network. Thus the provision of rural road network is a key component for any rural development programme as it enables the rural people to have access to schools, health centers’ and markets etc. The present study is an attempt to gauge the role played by the rural roads in rural economy of Assam in India. Rural roads are the lifelines to the rural people in their economic pursuits. But there are a large number of problems associate with the development of rural roads in Assam. The study is based on both primary and secondary data. Basic secondary data has been collected from the Directorate of Economics and Statistics, Govt. of Assam. Primary data have also been collected to supplement the secondary data base. In order to collect primary data, Nagaon district of Assam (India) has been selected purposively. It is decided to analysis rural road connectivity on the basis of representative sampling instead of taking the whole district. For collecting primary data one structural interview schedules comprising of both open ended and close ended questions have been used after pretesting. Double difference method is used to ascertain the socio-economic impact. The study shows that the existence of all weather roads constitutes an essential enabling condition for improvement in the living condition of the people it serves. Such a road facilities the use of a variety of vehicles which are more regular, speedy and often economical. Improvement in transport facilities makes certain critical services and facilities such as education, health care etc. relatively easily accessible to people compared to an area lacking a road. Field data also reveals that the frequencies of different vehicles playing in the project road are much higher compared to control road. It has been found that in education sector there is increase in the enrollment of students, both boys and girls, in the primary schools. Also the employment rate in government sector is higher in the project area. A sizeable number of agricultural labourers in the project villages left the agriculture sector and started earning the livelihood as workers in the service sector, especially transport, trade and construction activities compared to control villages. Distance of household from the road and market is found to negatively related to the household income which means that longer the distance of a household from the road and market lower is the household income. Keywords: control road, development, economic development, project road, rural road etc.
Ganga Rani Das