Investigating the linkage between infrastructure and regional development in India: era of planning to globalisation

The paper tries to find out the role played by economic and social infrastructure facilities in economic development across Indian states over the last quarter century. Infrastructure services have been indexed with the help of principal component analysis. Both parametric and non-parametric estimates are done to assess per capita income disparity. A comparative static framework is developed for testing the nature of movement of the development trajectory in income infrastructure plane over different time spans. The findings are statistically very significant to warrant new regional policies under the overall framework of globalisation in order to remove rising regional disparities in both infrastructure and income. This has a strong bearing on the success of poverty removal policies under globalisation as the poor are regionally concentrated in such diverse and heterogeneous country.