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| Rural infra continues to get UPA push |
| BS Reporter / Feb 27, 2010, 01:56 IST |
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Rs 48,000 cr for the six-fold action plan for rural infra.
BHARAT NIRMAN, the six-fold action plan for rural infrastructure development charted out four years ago by the then UPA government, will enter the second year of its second phase with Rs 48,000 crore, with the bulk of the increase going to rural electrification, housing and roads.
The umbrella scheme, which has a clutch of six different programmes under it, had entered the second phase in 2009 with an allocation of Rs 40,900 crore. This year, it has gone up to Rs 48,000 crore.
The main areas covered under it are roads, houses, drinking water, irrigation, telephony and electricity in rural areas. The budget for the first phase was Rs 1,74,000 crore. But in the second phase, the road component alone is expected to cost Rs 1,32,000 crore, the Budget document points out.
Roads: The Pradhan Mantri Grameen Sadak Yojana (PMGSY), which targets to connect villages with a population of 1,000, has got an allocation of Rs 9,995 crore as against last year’s revised allocation of Rs 9,475 crore. The Yojana was launched on December 25, 2000 as a 100 per cent centrally sponsored scheme. But today it meets its expenses also through loans from the Asian Development Bank and World Bank .
In addition, an allocation of Rs 10,000 crore has been made as loan for PMGSY through the RIDF window of NABARD.
The PMGSY was to connect 66,000 habitations in the previous four years. The target now is to reach 1,67,000 habitations at a cost of Rs 1,32,000 crore by 2012.
Houses: The Bharat Nirman component on housing, called Indira Awas Yojana, which was to build 6 million dwellings in the four years ending 2009, now has a target of 12 million houses in the coming four years. The funds for this scheme implemented by the rural development ministry have gone up from Rs 7,918 crore last year to Rs 8,996 crore this year.
About Rs 5,000 crore for this scheme will be provided by the National Investment Fund.
Power: The funds for rural electrification have gone up this year with fund transfers to Rajiv Gandhi Grameen Vidyutikaran Yojana going up this year from Rs 3,100 crore to Rs 5,000 crore. The entire funding for the scheme is coming from the National Investment Fund.
The scheme was started with the aim of providing power connections to 100,000 villages and release electricity connections to 23 million rural BPL households in five years.
Irrigation: The Bharat Nirman also targets increase in irrigated area to 10 million hectares. Irrigation programmes under the water resources ministry have got very limited encouragement financially, with a raise in allocation from Rs 185 crore to Rs 247 crore for major and medium irrigation projects.
The minor irrigation projects allocation went up from Rs 74 crore to Rs 112 crore.
Phones: In rural telephony, the funds for telephone connections to the unconnected habitations remained static at Rs 2,400 crore.
The funds are provided through the Universal Service Obligation Fund of the telecommunications ministry.
Drinking water: The allocations for rural drinking water supply went up by over Rs 1,000 crore from Rs 7,199 crore in 2009 to Rs 8,100 crore in 2010-11.
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