PM Modi's plan to link unconnected rural areas face roadblocks in 9 states

Smooth ride in overall rural road programme

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ambitious target of connecting 65,000 unreached habitations through all-weather rural roads by 2019 could face a big challenge unless there is major scale-up in construction in nine major states that includes BJP-ruled Assam, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Rajasthan.

These states along with Bihar, Uttarakhand, West Bengal and Odisha account for more than 80 per cent of 65,000 unconnected habitations.

Officials said these nine states have to speed up their pace of construction much faster than others to reach the targeted cut-off date.

In Assam, officials said as of now around 2.23 kilometers of rural roads area constructed per day, while to reach the target it has to scale it up to 22 kilometers per day.

Similarly, Jharkhand has to scale up its per day rural road construction five times, while in Jammu and Kashmir the pace has to be upped by six times from the current level.

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

He said detailed project report (DPRs) of the all the remaining habitations would be complete that by December 2016.

All states have been instructed that they must ensure that almost 15 per cent of material used should be green technology like 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 as on date because of good progress in some states, barring the nine mentioned earlier.

Overall, though the rural roads programme known as Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY) has seen a huge improvement in the last two years and in 2016-17, it is all poised to exceed the target of constructing 48,812 kilometers of roads, by almost 1,188 kilometers.

Officials said this financial year around 50,000 kilometers of rural roads would be constructed of which almost 23,445 kilometers (around 48 per cent of the target) has already been achieved.

The ministry hopes to raise the overall pace of rural roads construction to 170 kilometers per day by 2018-19 from the current average level of 133 kilometers a day.

In the next three years, the Narendra Modi government plans to spend around Rs 81,000 crore on PMGSY of which the Centre's own share will be around Rs 57,000 crore.

PMGSY launched in 2000 during the previous NDA regime has been one of most focused programmes of the government to boost the rural economy.

Around 480,000 kilometers of rural roads had been constructed in the last 16 years since the start of the programme in 2000.