Speed bumps on the road to rural connectivity

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ambitious target to connect 65,000 unconnected rural habitations through al weather roads by 2019 could face a big challenge unless there is major scale-up in construction in nine major states, including Bharatiya Janata Partyruled Assam, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Rajasthan.

These states, along with Bihar, Uttarakhand, West Bengal and Odisha, account for 80 per cent of the 65,000 unconnected habitations in the country. According to officials, these nine states have to speed up their pace of construction to meet the 2019 deadline.

In Assam, 2.23 km of rural roads are constructed per day, officials said. To meet the target, this should be scaled up to 22 km a day. Similarly, Jharkhand has to scale up its per-day rural road construction five times, while in Jammu & Kashmir, the pace has to be increased six times from the current level.

“We are regularly holding discussions and meeting with the slow-moving states to persuade them to speed up the work. From November 1, we will monitor their works through geo-tagging of assets. We’re hopeful that they would improve in the coming years,” said a senior official from the ministry of rural development.

He said the detailed project reports of all the remaining habitations would be complete by December this year. States have been instructed to ensure almost 15 per cent of material used is green technology such as cement, concrete blocks, fly ash, plastic waste, etc, while giving approvals for new rural roads.

The number of unconnected habitations has come down to 58,000 since 2014, thanks to good progress in some states, barring the nine mentioned above.

The rural roads programme known as Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY) has seen a huge improvement in the past two years. In 2016-17, it is poised to exceed the target of constructing 48,812 km roads by 1,188 km. Officials said 23,445 km (around 48 per cent of the target for FY17) has already been achieved. The roads ministry hopes to raise the overall pace of rural roads construction to 170 km per day by 2018-19, from the current average level of 133 km a day. Over the next three years, the Modi government plans to spend ~81,000 crore on PMGSY, of which the Centre’s share will be ~57,000 crore. Launched in 2000 during the previous National Democratic Alliance regime, PMGSY has been one of most focused programmes of the government to boost rural economy.

Nearly 480,000 km of rural roads have been constructed over the past 16 years.