Infrastructure Development in Punjab, Pakistan : From Assessment to Spatiotemporal Analysis at District Level

Access to inclusive and sustainable infrastructure to the masses of each spatial unit of any country and region is of the paramount importance. This paper aims at examining the level of infrastructure development, analysis of spatial disparities in infrastructure and temporal comparison of infrastructure development across the districts in Punjab, Pakistan. For this purpose, the current study uses a wide range of indicators to depict the real picture of infrastructure development in Punjab and to analyze the spatiotemporal dynamics. The overall infrastructure development has been divided into three sub-dimensions; public-utilities infrastructure, communication infrastructure and social infrastructure. All the data has been taken from Multiple Indicators Cluster Survey (MICS) Punjab, Census of Healthcare Establishments in Punjab, and Punjab Development Statistics (PDS). For the temporal assessment, the two different time periods of 2011 and 2014 have also been compared. The Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) technique has been used to assign the weights to indicators in sub-dimensions and to each sub-dimension in the composite index. Geographic Information System (GIS) tools have also been applied for spatial mapping and representation of analysis results. The study finds that the Southern and South-Western districts of Punjab are the most deprived districts in all dimensions of infrastructure studied in this study. Whereas, the districts of North and North-Eastern Punjab are the best districts in almost all dimensions of infrastructure development. The temporal analysis reveals that the level of infrastructure development depreciated in most of the districts as it could not be developed as per the increase in population. These findings emphasize the need for prioritizing the public investment on infrastructure in the deprived districts on the Southern and South-Western border of Punjab to remove the disparities