Monumental infrastructure although, sometimes expedient for politico-cultural reasons, is most often wasteful, elite centric and exclusive. The visible infrastructure is necessary and is beneficial to all if planned and built appropriately. After all, you don’t have to see all the plumbing and pumps to see where your water is coming from and where your waste is going. Of these three categories, the invisible infrastructure tends to be most beneficial to the poorer segments of the society. The visible infrastructure could take on a monumental scale in dams, bridges, convention centres, motorways and so on. Visible infrastructure could include: roads, canals, railway lines, mass transit etc.
Invisible infrastructure could include: water supply and sewerage, health care, waste disposal and electronic communication etc. Infrastructure could be simply categorised as: invisible, visible and monumental. For many Pakistanis, the same infrastructure has become a curse, and relieved them of their right to mobility, livelihoods and even life spaces. The likes of me (middle to upper class Pakistanis) in our air conditioned cars, enjoy the motorways, signal-free corridors and underpasses ushered in by the Sharif brother’s obsession with transport infrastructure.
Mercedes minivans were imported, as were Daewoo buses, and supposedly development took place as a result. We will import Mercedes wagons to replace them’. I remember Mian Nawaz Sharif in 1997 just after the inauguration of the M2 Islamabad-Lahore motorway saying, ‘how are we going to have development if we continue to have broken down shabby busses and wagons plying this new motorway. Infrastructure was to be the saviour and throughout the 1950s-1990s, development meant more infrastructure ( World Bank reports).
0 kommentar(er)
