Effects of Public Investment in Infrastructure on Growth and Poverty in India

Counter factual policy simulations of sustained increase in public investment in infrastructure, financed through borrowing from commercial banks, shows substantial increase in private investment and thereby output in this sector. Further, due to increase in absorption, real private investment and thereby output in all the other three sectors also seems to increase, which sets-in motion several other macro economic changes. A 20% sustained increase in public investment in infrastructure, which is 0.5% of GDP and 2.7% of total govt. revenue in 2000-03, can accelerate the real macro economic growth by 1.8% in the medium to long-run (6-10 years after the policy change). This will be accompanied by a 1.4% fall in wholesale price index and 0.2% decline in the rate of inflation. Sectoral prices, except that of agriculture, also decline to varying extent, the steepest decline being for infrastructure price. Further, this increase in income will lead to 0.7% reduction in poverty in rural India. This shows the potential for achieving the much-debated 10% aggregate real GDP growth in the Indian economy.Public Inversment, Infrastructure, Growth, poverty, India

Effects of public investment in infrastructure on growth and poverty in India

Counter factual policy simulations of sustained increase in public investment in infrastructure, financed through borrowing from commercial banks, shows substantial increase in private investment and thereby output in this sector. Further, due to increase in absorption, real private investment and thereby output in all the other three sectors also seems to increase, which sets-in motion several other macro economic changes. A 20 sustained increase in public investment in infrastructure, which is 0.5 of GDP and 2.7 of total govt. revenue in 2000-03, can accelerate the real macro economic growth by 1.8 in the medium to long-run (6-10 years after the policy change). This will be accompanied by a 1.4 fall in wholesale price index and 0.2 decline in the rate of inflation. Sectoral prices, except that of agriculture, also decline to varying extent, the steepest decline being for infrastructure price. Further, this increase in income will lead to 0.7 reduction in poverty in rural India. This shows the potential for achieving the much-debated 10 aggregate real GDP growth in the Indian economy.

PS-Sim: A Framework for Scalable Simulation of Participatory Sensing Data

Emergence of smartphone and the participatory sensing (PS) paradigm have paved the way for a new variant of pervasive computing. In PS, human user performs sensing tasks and generates notifications, typically in lieu of incentives. These notifications are real-time, large-volume, and multi-modal, which are eventually fused by the PS platform to generate a summary. One major limitation with PS is the sparsity of notifications owing to lack of active participation, thus inhibiting large scale real-life experiments for the research community. On the flip side, research community always needs ground truth to validate the efficacy of the proposed models and algorithms. Most of the PS applications involve human mobility and report generation following sensing of any event of interest in the adjacent environment. This work is an attempt to study and empirically model human participation behavior and event occurrence distributions through development of a location-sensitive data simulation framework, called PS-Sim. From extensive experiments it has been observed that the synthetic data generated by PS-Sim replicates real participation and event occurrence behaviors in PS applications, which may be considered for validation purpose in absence of the groundtruth. As a proof-of-concept, we have used real-life dataset from a vehicular traffic management application to train the models in PS-Sim and cross-validated the simulated data with other parts of the same dataset.Comment: Published and Appeared in Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Smart Computing (SMARTCOMP-2018