A State Level Analysis of the Social Infrastructure: Public Private Partnership in Education and Health
S. Ashwin Ram
Madras School of Economics, Gandhi Mandapam Road, Chennai 600025, Tamil Nadu, India.
Zareena Begum Irfan *
Madras School of Economics, Gandhi Mandapam Road, Chennai 600025, Tamil Nadu, India.
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
Since 1991, several sectors have experimented with Public Private Partnership (PPP) for infrastructure development in India, particularly at the National level with mixed results. However, there have been relatively fewer instances of PPPs at the state and local levels. This is mainly due to bottlenecks to PPPs at the Institutional, Organisational and Project level in Indian states. In response, the Indian government has initiated several schemes to enable state governments to implement infrastructure projects via PPP. India has also not experiment and explored the opportunities of PPP in social infrastructure. Though India has increasingly recognised the need for PPP in infrastructure development and has implemented some successful infrastructure projects through the PPP mode in the core and urban infrastructure, it is yet to realise its potential on social infrastructure. India as one of the leading countries of the Asian economy should highly target on the social development along with the economic growth for a sustainable development. Education and health form the major part of social infrastructure where India has a huge gap and thus scope to experiment with PPP. Considering the fact of the poor education and health status in India, it is the right time to enhance these potential sectors to move on ladder of economic and social development. This calls for exploring many opportunities and PPP is one effective way of achieving better social delivery. On the backdrop of this, the paper tries to explore the opportunities for implementing PPP in social infrastructure by analysing the effects of public and private expenditure on Human Development Index (HDI) and exploring it through case studies.
Keywords: Public private partnership, social infrastructure, human development index, education, health