Chapter 1: Introduction and Overview

Why, what and how social infrastructure development are a few important questions to ask and answer, especially in contemporary times and in the 21st century. All independent nations, including developing ones, aim to create abilities and capabilities to care for their societies and people to increase happiness, life satisfaction and overall social welfare. Especially, such consensus and compulsion are consciously growing by completely eradicating poverty, hunger and deprivation from their soil. Therefore, creating the necessary infrastructure for human beings is an order of the day to enhance social welfare. Physical, economic and social growth is led by the provision of sound and adequate infrastructure, besides achieving settlements sustainability, more so in urban, and facilitating the supply of goods, services and information (Gill, 1996). If this offers the answer partly to the questions, the literary meaning of infrastructure is a foundation that stimulates substantive actions by the state/government mostly and society as a community for socialisation, assembly, prayer, mobilisation and entertainment (Latham & Layton, 2022). At the same time, in the absence of adequate public interventions in the infrastructure creation, the deprived family resorts to meeting immediate infrastructure needs alternatively at a subsistence level on a short-term basis. Families’ actions for meeting the needed infrastructure have been largely a case of rural, backward regions and sub-urban areas of developing countries. Infrastructure can be economic and social, which is a critical need for prosperity in any society on a sustainable basis. If economic infrastructure brings economic growth and economic advancement, social infrastructure promotes the well-being and social welfare of mankind. Economic infrastructure is capital equipment in nature generally provided or regulated by the state essential for improving the productive capacity of the nation. It is used to produce public facilities like physical structures and services like roads, railways, airports, electricity, telecommunication, gas, energy and water supplies, which would not only create opportunities for the people but also bring prosperity. Economic infrastructure provides an essential background for other economic activities in modern economies and their absence is a characteristic of less-developed countries and handicaps their development. Social infrastructure on the other hand is the availability of primary amenities for the population encompassing around the basic requirements, which promotes human prosperity and enhances the satisfaction level of human needs. Suharto Teriman et al. (2011) point out that social infrastructure is crucial to the building of a healthy community and sustainable environment since it is provided in response to the basic needs of communities and to enhance the quality of life, human resources, equity, stability, social well-being, human and social capital. By and large on the same grounds, Elena et al. (2016) rightly argue that social factors characterise the level and living standards of the population that determine the needs of the social groups in the development of social infrastructure. Effective development of social infrastructure provides a pledging of social security and political participation at various levels. Further, social infrastructure is characterised as a soft infrastructure that provides a social environment, services and programmes that support the accumulation and enhancement of human capital (Casey, 2005; Williams & Pocock, 2010). The interesting dimension is that social infrastructures are places that allow people to gather, crowd together, experience their culture together, support community life, friends to spend time together and care for each other, places that encourage people to exercise, play sports, dance, live comfortably alone and alongside one another (Latham & Layton, 2022).