NEW DELHI: The Centre will have to ramp up the pace of road construction from 134 km to 167 km per day to clinch the flagship rural roads programme, PMGSY, this year.
The rural development ministry has fixed the deadline for financial year 2018-19 to wrap up the first phase of PMGSY. Roads totalling to 61,000 km remain to be constructed.
According to a study done by the ministry, the tough deadline implies upping the daily road construction by 33 km to 167 km. It is a challenging task given that construction has been increased with difficulty over last few years.
The deadline of 2019 has been set for most of the central schemes as the ruling
BJP seeks to prepare a progress report for the
Lok Sabha elections.
At a recent presentation where RD minister
Narendra Singh Tomar unveiled the “gram swaraj abhiyan”, the Centre’s 21-day rural outreach, the ministry announced with emphasis it would finish the PMGSY this year.
Amarjeet Sinha, Secretary, RD, told TOI, “It is a challenge but we should be close to 100% in 2019. There may be slippages in Assam, Jammu & Kashmir, Uttarakhand, Malkangiri district of
Odisha, naxal-affected pockets of Chhattisgarh and
North Bengal.”
If the ministry appears to be facing an uphill task, it is because of the history of construction since the scheme was launched as an open-ended programme of sorts in 2000. Since then, the RD ministry has connected 1.52 lakh settlements.
In 2016-17, rural roads were constructed at 130 km a day and the pace was stretched to 134 km in 2017-18. However, officials point out that it was a massive jump over previous years.
The road construction had languished at a daily average of 73 kms between 2011-2014, the low figures largely attributable to inadequate resources.
The optimism in the RD ministry that the target of 167 km a day would be achieved is based on the availability of resources as well as the urgency of a tight deadline.
Representative image