This unit covers engineering, socio-economic and environmental aspects with a multi-dimensional approach to mitigate the negative consequences of infrastructural development. The main focus would be to examine the theoretical underpinning of varied empirical explanations for knowledge synthesis and its transfer for practical intervention.

The changes in the mobility patterns do make an impact on people’s livelihood, access to social development, increased social risks, production and consumption patterns and supply chain. This may also increase development activities like industrialisation, tourism which may have a serious influence on people’s social lives, water quality and its availability, air quality, consumption patterns and even music and culture.

This unit shall also capture the changes in cultural values, marketization of cultural monuments and heritage, exploitation of natural resources, changes in demographic community structures, social tensions, crime and violence.

This unit shall strive to bridge the distributional gaps in terms of benefits across populations and policy recommendations to fill these gaps and it shall evolve strategies particularly on social aspects of road safety, including financial investments to enhance awareness of road conduct amongst various users, etc.

Further, the benefits from reduction in travel time and material costs for the commuters, and also to quantity contribution to local economies through tourism and changing land use and land value shall also be quantified.

The main thrust of this unit is to provide inputs to enrich public policy to address issues relating to citizens’ well being by making highways sustainable and safe. And also to create platforms for public engagement in making transportation safe, affordable, profitable and social development accessible to people living on the margins.