Anticipating higher economic growth resulting in accelerated demand for infrastructural facilities, the Survey has suggested appropriate pricing policies to enable effective cost recovery. In order to create additional capacity, investment of a much higher order in a key sectors like railways, roads and ports is also needed, the Survey points out.

The Survey has called for specific structural reforms to ensure greater inflow of private investment in desired areas.

Estimates indicate that by 2000 AD, road traffic will account for 85 per cent of passenger and 65 per cent of goods traffic. This calls for an urgent need to identify the major bottlenecks that impede the smooth traffic flow.

According to the Survey, the critical issues to be tackled are immediate implementationof policy and regulatory framework to encourage private investment in roads as the scarcity of public funds calls for increased private participation.

The Survey has pointed out that Indian ports suffer from problems of outdated organisational modes and low productivity of labour and equipment in comparision to many other Asian ports.

A major problem with the ports is the mismatch between the existing capacity and the demand for traffic. As against the total capacity of 217.3 million tonnes on March 1977, major ports handled 227.3 million tonnes in 1996-97 resulting in pre-berthing delays and longer ship turnaround time.

The Survey has recommended creation of capacity to be planned according to the projected traffic requirements.

Indian ports continue to show lower productivity in comparison to efficient ports in the Asian region in terms of labour and equipment productivity norms.

The slowdown in the industrial production and economic activity in general has to some extent, affected freight demandfor the railways.

While there was growth in traffic for coal, foodgrains, cement, iron ore for exports and other goods, there was decline in carriage of fertilisers, pig iron and finished steel from steel plants, petroleum and its products and raw materials for steel plants excluding coal.

The railways continues to suffer from substantial operational losses in their provision of susidised service.

In case of railways, the heavy cross-subsidy of passenger traffic by freight traffic has led to a situation where the country's comparative advantage in key sectors such as coal and steel has been severely eroded.

The Survey states that besides market borrowings,private sector participation through schemes like build-own-lease-transfer (BOLT) and own-your-wagon-scheme (OYWS) are also being encouraged.

In 1996-97, the Airports Authority of India (AAI) earned a net profit of Rs 132.1 crore as against Rs 145.2 crore crore in 1995-96.The lower level of profit is mostly attributed to higher scale of pay andallowances and increase in maintenance and other input costs.