Analysis of Micro Level Disparities in Urban Facility-Utility Services: A Study on Barasat City, West Bengal, India

Abstract

The regional disparity is a challenging issue to the urban planners, policy makers, academicians, bureaucrats and technocrats in the developing countries. In India, wide range of socio-economic disparities are commonly evident even in Class-I cities. Such an undesirable phenomena reflects on the spatial variation of quality of life, level of living as well as well-being and welfare of the inhabitants. Moreover, it is against the constitutional law of equity and social justice. The present study is based on the empirical observation focused on ward-wise variation of availability of and accessibility to socioeconomic and utility services in Barasat city of West Bengal. On the basis of 'Cronbach's Alpha' and 'Principal Component Analysis', entire set of data have been arranged into six factors of which first three factors have been considered to examine the dimension of socio-economic disparities and level of development in the city.