Infrastructure is the basic physical and organizational structures needed for the operation of a society or enterprise, or the services and facilities necessary for an economy to function. The term typically refers to the technical structures that support a society, such as roads, water supply, sewers, power grids, telecommunications, and so forth. Viewed functionally, infrastructure facilitates the production of goods and services; for example, roads enable the transport of raw materials to a factory, and also for the distribution of finished products to markets. In some contexts, the term may also include basic social services such as schools and hospitals. In military parlance, the term refers to the buildings and permanent installations necessary for the support, redeployment, and operation of military forces. In this article, infrastructure will be used in the sense of technical structures or physical networks that support society, unless specified otherwise.

According to etymology online, the word infrastructure has been used in English since at least 1927 and meant: The installations that form the basis for any operation or system. Other sources, such as the Oxford English Dictionary, trace the word's origins to earlier usage, originally applied in a military sense. The word was imported from French, where it means subgrade, the native material underneath a constructed pavement or railway. The word is a combination of the Latin prefix "infra", meaning "below" and "structure". The military sense of the word was probably first used in France, and imported into English around the time of the First World War. The military use of the term achieved currency in the United States after the formation of NATO in the 1940s, and was then adopted by urban planners in its modern civilian sense by 1970.

The term came to prominence in the United States in the 1980s following the publication of America in Ruins (Choate and Walter, 1981) , which initiated a public-policy discussion of the nation’s "infrastructure crisis", purported to be caused by decades of inadequate investment and poor maintenance of public works.

That public-policy discussion was hampered by lack of a precise definition for infrastructure. A U.S. National Research Council panel sought to clarify the situation by adopting the term "public works infrastructure", referring to:

    "...both specific functional modes - highways, streets, roads, and bridges; mass transit; airports and airways; water supply and water resources; wastewater management; solid-waste treatment and disposal; electric power generation and transmission; telecommunications; and hazardous waste management - and the combined system these modal elements comprise. A comprehension of infrastructure spans not only these public works facilities, but also the operating procedures, management practices, and development policies that interact together with societal demand and the physical world to facilitate the transport of people and goods, provision of water for drinking and a variety of other uses, safe disposal of society's waste products, provision of energy where it is needed, and transmission of information within and between communities."

In subsequent years, the word has grown in popularity and been applied with increasing generality to suggest the internal framework discernible in any technology system or business organization.

The 2009 report card produced by the American Society of Civil Engineers gives America's Infrastructure a grade of "D".

Source: Wikipedia.org