The Survey bears strong hints of policy packages in the offing, ``geared to encourage greater private participation in all infrastructure sectors so that this vital pre-requisite to higher growth is within reach.'' The last Budget had announced several fiscal sops intended to lure investment in infrastructure projects, including slashed corporate and personal income tax rates.

The Survey reiterates, ``innovative incentive packages will have to be offered to induce greater private involvement,'' since the government resources were ``not adequate.'' It recommends policies and initiatives that could augmentexisting infrastructure facilities and ``create fresh capacities.'' The Survey partly blames the slower growth of the gross domestic product (GDP) last year to ``a combination of underlying supply factors'' which could in turn, be traced to the ``quality, quantity and cost of basic infrastructure services'' like power, the railways and roads and to some extent, ports, airports and telecommunications.

If the deceleration in GDP growth to five per cent from 7.5 per cent in 1996-97 was because of shoddy infrastructure facilities, much of the growth in industrial production was also because of infrastructure related industries and services. Six basic industries like power, coal, cement, crude oil and petroleum and oil lubricants (POL) production (which together have a weight of 28.8 per cent in the index of industrial production,) grew by 4.6 per cent during the first 11 months of last year.

The production of the manufacturing sector, in contrast, went up by only 3.6 per cent. The overall industrialproduction grew by 4.2 per cent, but cement production went up by 9.4 per cent, from 9.2 per cent the year before. Electricity generation soared by 6.7 per cent, compared to 3.7 per cent in 1996-97.

Not counting coal and steel production and the throughput of oil refineries, the output of all infrastructure industries galloped last year. Coal production went up by 3.9 per cent between April 1997 and February this year, compared to 6.8 per cent during the corresponding 11 months of 1996-97. The throughput of the 14 oil refineries in the country went up by 3.6 per cent, compared to 7.1 per cent the year before. Saleable steel production is estimated to have grown by 0.5 per cent last year, compared to two per cent in 1996-97.

All other basic, or infrastructure-related industries and services galloped however. Even crude oil production, which had dropped by 9.3 per cent in the previous fiscal, increased marginally by 3.3 per cent last year.

Infrastructure services also ``showed some improvement,'' theSurvey says. The growth of non-traded infrastructure services like electricity generation, gas, water, the Railways and other transport and communication is expected to be higher than that of the GDP.

These services grew by 7.9 per cent in 1996-97, when the GDP growth was 7.5 per cent. In the fiscal just gone by, non-traded infrastructure services are estimated to have grown by 7.5 per cent compared to the overall GDP growth of five per cent.

Electricity generation grew up 6.7 per cent during the 11 months of last year, compared to 3.7 per cent during the same period in 1996-97, primarily because of a ``turnaround in hydroelectric generation.'' The services sector like trade, hotels, transport and communications, financial services, business and public administration, grew by 8.9 per cent during 1997-98, compared to 8.1 per cent the year before.