GIS@development December 2001: Developing social infrastructure indicators for Dehradun municipal area

In most of the Indian cities, the municipal bodies have the primary responsibility to cater to the basic needs of the citizen by providing required essential services and infrastructure facilities. But in the last century, the cities throughout the developing world have seen an extraordinary increase in their population, which has placed a major strain on the delivery of the basic infrastructure services. A major concern of municipalities in developing countries is the limited access to urban services of larger parts of the city population. Equitable distribution is becoming the centre of concern in planning the infrastructure facilities. There is an urgent need to solve this problem of unbalanced distribution of infrastructure services. Keeping in view the above problem there is an urgent need of assessing the exact level of infrastructure services in different areas or wards, so as to rank them according to their facilities level and then take appropriate steps. As UNDP’s Human Development report of 1992 argues “The purpose of development is to create an environment in which all people can expand their capabilities and opportunities, can be enlarged for both present and future generations”. Thereby necessitating the documentation of this unequal distribution of infrastructure facilities. The infrastructure facilities can basically be divided into two parts:

Physical infrastructure: consisting of water supply, electric power supply, sewage, transportation, etc.
Social infrastructure: consisting of Banks, post-office, schools, medical facilities, etc.

In assessing the level of infrastructure services, there must be some ways of measuring, so that the infrastructure level can be expressed quantitatively. The infrastructure indicators are used for this purpose. Indicators are models, which merge or simplify a complex subject or number of variables into a single number or numbers, which can be easily understood by decision makers. The indicators are user generated, so that differences in the values of indicator are more important than their absolute values. UNCHS in their indicators program, “Monitoring the city, volume-2, 1995” defined indicators as follows: “The indicator is a tool for monitoring and reviewing the condition of cities providing benchmark for the development of urban conditions and urban policy over space and time. A good indicator should be simple, reliable, sensitive to change, and should be expressed quantitatively.”

Indicators are often valuable not as an absolute measure of a particular phenomena, but rather in a context of change over time, distribution over space or distribution over social groups. The indicators and infrastructure facilities used in this study depend on the data available and are discussed later in the article.

Study Area
The Dehradun city is located in the southern part of Dehradun district between 78o00’E to 78o10’E and 30o15’N to 30o25’N. Dehradun is the intermittent capital of Uttranchal State besides being the district headquarters. Its strategic location at the foothills of the Himalayas and as a gateway to the hills has made it an important hill station in India. It has emerged as the premier business as well as service centre within the hilly region of Uttranchal. A number of civil and defense institutions of national repute signify its importance in the country. The study area consisting of Dehradun municipal Board was originally divided into 34 wards according to the 1991 census data but in 1995, during the preparation of voters list for Municipal election the wards were revised and reduced to 33 in number (fig.1). Two intermittent streams namely Rispana and Bindal River, on the east and west respectively mark the physical limit of Dehradun Municipal area. The area under the administrative control of Dehradun Municipal board is 2871.1 Ha., with a population of 270,000 (approx.). The major functions of Dehradun city are administrative, educational, commercial, defense and tourism. The central part of the city is conventional built up with densely populated areas having unplanned land use. The residences are mostly converted into commercial land uses, thus constituting the CBD (Central Business District) area. The prestigious research and education institutes are situated away from the core or CBD area. The western side houses the Cantonment, Forest Research Institute, Oil and Natural Gas Corporation. The eastern and northern sides are mainly residential. The southern side also houses the cantonment area and is designated as the industrial area. The Cantonment area in the western part of the city as well as large office complexes of national repute and terrain conditions are the limiting factors for physical development of the city. Broadly the city has expanded towards south along major radial corridors. The road pattern of the city is radial with five main transportation corridors originating from the centre of the city. These radial roads serve for inter-city and intra-city traffic. Dehradun is the terminal point of Northern railways, but it serves only inter-city traffic and does not share the burden of roads for local traffic. The character of the city is changing from services to industry, trade and commerce while expanding its secondary and tertiary sectors in order to strengthen its economic base. Its diversification from uni-functional to multi-functional base has contemplated many changes in its functional character. This has attracted a large population from regional areas, thus putting additional strain on existing infrastructure. Thus there is an urgent need to develop infrastructure indictors for city, at ward level, so as to identify areas for future action, as failure to provide adequate infrastructure services results in many of the well known costs of rapid urbanization i.e. threats to health, urban productivity and environmental degradation.

Objectives of Study
To aim of the study is to develop a methodology, which can be used to monitor social infrastructure level at ward level in Dehradun Municipal area. The methodology could answer the question “In which wards the social infrastructure is lower and has to be given priority for action”. Broadly the study has been carried out to develop social infrastructure indicators and to assess ward the infrastructure level. However in case of social infrastructure only Post-offices, Banks and Schools have been considered as data for these facilities was available. A database of these facilities was generated using ArcInfo3.5.1 and ArcView 3.1 GIS software.

Development of Indicators
Since there is no perfect way to represent the conditions of each ward, it is common practice to assume that the ward status can be estimated with reasonable accuracy by one or more indicators that present a proxy picture of these conditions. There may be cases where a single indicator will not conveniently represent its ward. In such cases it is appropriate to calculate a compound indicator. The resulting single value will represent better infrastructure level in a ward as compared to the individual indicators.

For each facility the proposed indicators are the :

Number of facility/Total population of the ward
Number of facility/Total area of the ward

Since the number of school going children was not available so for schools only the area indicator has been used.

The indicators that were developed for each facility are: PI₁ = (Number of Postoffice in each ward/Total population of the ward)*10000
PI₂ = (Number of of Postoffice in each ward/Total area of the ward)*1000
BI₁ = (Number of Banks in each ward/Total population of the ward)*10000
BI₂ = (Number of Banks in each ward/Total area of the ward)*1000
SI₂ = (Number of Schools in each ward/Total area of the ward)*1000 The above mentioned indicators were also calculated for Dehradun Municipal area, as explained below: PI_pp = (No. of Postoffice in Municipal area/Total population of Municipal Area)*10000
PI_pa = (No. of Postoffice in Municipal area/Total Municipal Area)*1000
BI_bp = (No. of Banks in Municipal area/Total population of Municipal Area)*10000
BI_ba = (No. of Banks in Municipal area/Total Municipal Area)*1000
SI_sa = (No.of Schools in Municipal area/Total Municipal Area)*1000 Based on the above indicators, indices were calculated for each facility wardwise. The method used for calculation of indices was: II₁ = (PI1/PIpp)*100
II₂ = (PI2 / PIpa)*100
II₃ = (BI1 / BIbp)*100
II₄ = (BI2 / BIba)*100
II₅ = (SI1 / SIsa)*100 These indices were added together and divided by 5 to obtain a final index or indicator for each ward that reflected the condition of social infrastructure in that ward. All wards having an index of 100 were considered as having moderate social infrastructure, those having a index of more than 100 were classified as having social infrastructure and wards having a index of less than 100 were classified as having bad social infrastructure (fig.4).

Discussion

Ward no.26, 20 &31 are having very good social infrastructure (fig.4), while the population density in ward no. 26 and 20 is low, ward no. 31 has a very high density.
The above wards which have a very good level of social infrastructure are surrounded by wards having a good level of social infrastructure i.e. wards no. 28, 5, 30, 17, 12, 33, 14. These wards usually have very high to high population density, as they mainly constitute the old part of the city.
Ward no. 21, 10 have got moderately good level of social infrastructure with the population density ranging between low to very low.
Ward no.15, 9, 25, 18, 23, 11, 6 which are located on the outer periphery of the city have got a bad to moderately bad level of social infrastructure with population ranging from very low to high.
Ward no. 32, 24, 8, 27, 22, 4, 2, 19 have got a very bad level of social infrastructure and a population density ranging from high to very low.

Conclusions
The areas lying in the center of the city near the CBD have got a good to very good level of social infrastructure. Since the city has mainly developed along the transport corridors in a radial pattern, the areas that have developed along these roads have a moderately good to very bad social infrastructure. The wards that have developed in south-east and north-west along Rispana and Bindal rivers have got a very bad level of social infrastructure as slums have grown in these wards along the river beds. The use of GIS in creating a tabular database and linking it with a geographic, database and converting the data into spatial form from which maps can be generated, proves the advantage and usefulness of GIS in this kind of studies.