This paper describes the rapid economic growth in the city of Visakhapatnam which is now one of India’s largest ports and an important industrial town and seaside resort/retirement centre. It highlights how the city’s further growth is constrained by inadequate investment in infrastructure - especially for water and electricity - and discusses the political and institutional reasons for this. It then presents the findings of participatory research on poverty, and the many dimensions of poverty which are emphasized by urban poor groups, including inadequate incomes, lack of assets (“no shelter, no property, no gold”), lack of support (especially for widows, deserted women and the handicapped), illness and debt. It discusses the direct and indirect impacts on poverty of a DFID slum improvement project, showing which improvements low-income groups particularly appreciated. This demonstrated the importance of infrastructure and service provision to poverty reduction within a wider recognition that this is but one important aspect.

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The Government of India is going ahead with e-Governance implementation vigorously. Research & development proposals are being sought from premier academic institutions too. India is one of the fastest growing Information Technology (IT) markets in the world and also the fastest growing personal computer market in the Asia-Pacific region. Almost half of IT hardware in India is consumed by the government in the operations as well as in various projects and programs. Inevitably, rapidly increasing computer waste is becoming the most significant of electronic waste (e-waste) being generated in India. This work proposes and reasons out the need of a national level inventory maintenance system in a uniform format; also reasoning out several benefits for the government including monitoring of the e-waste scenario.

The lead time of order processing plays a major role in air freight forwarding supply chain. The lead time of each order differs due to number of causes existing in the company. The major possible causes are identified for consideration. Pareto analysis is carried out to find out the causes for majority of lead time problems. Finally, four critical causes are short listed for optimizing the order process by reducing order delay or lead time.

The importance of providing enabling environments to the physically disabled and the ageing population is being stressed upon at international level. We reason out that certain information, which could be insignificant for the physically normal people, but is crucial to the physically disabled and the ageing persons, needs to be maintained in a network of local bodies of the government. We propose an e-participation scheme, wherein e-participation of entities of public interest, local government bodies and humanitarian agencies would improve the enabling environments.