That was the time when nearly 74 % of the rural population were not fully integrated into the national economy. Just imagine the dimension of the problem by the fact that till the year 2000, around 40 per cent of India's 825,000 habitations lacked all-weather roads.

Keeping this in view, in the year 2000, the Government of India launched the Prime Minister's Rural Roads program (PMGSY). The program aims to connect 180,000 villages nationwide by constructing 370,000 kms of all weather roads and upgrading another 370,000 kms of the existing rural road network. The PMGSY program is now part of the Bharat Nirman initiative.

However, the programme has been implemented at snail's pace. Until end November 2007 - the 7th year of the program's implementation - a total of 100,000 kms of roads had been built, serving about 45 million people.
Some 20,000 habitations have been connected so far as against the aim of connecting 180,000 villages nationwide while the length of the roads built is about only thirty percent of the target.


What happened to the villages that were connected to all weathered roads?

A World Bank report says:

From the rough, mountainous terrain of Himachal Pradesh to the dry, rugged landscape of Rajasthan, new roads are revitalizing the rural economy, raising incomes, and improving the quality of rural life. Farmers now find it easier to take their produce to market in time, school enrollment is on the rise, and families' access to health care has improved. Where roads have been built, the rural economy has flourished. This has in turn encouraged some migrants to return home to farm their lands or set up new businesses.


A noteworthy feature
The Rural Roads Project has brought about a paradigm shift in the way rural roads are mapped, designed, monitored, and built.
People Make the Choices: A unique feature of the program is the 'Transect Walk' where representatives of local communities walk the entire stretch of the proposed road so that their concerns can be taken into account at the design stage itself. For instance, where the community feels that a culturally sacred place, a heritage site, or an important seasonal water body will be affected by the road, an alternative route is found. If the proposed route crosses a very poor villager's land, it is ensured that this land is not acquired.

Green Norms Established: The project has helped to lay down an environmental protection code to ensure that trees are planted along the newly built roads, steep hillsides are stabilized, the top soil is not affected, and debris from construction is not left behind after the work is done.

Quality Control: Before the project began, each state government had its own benchmarks for the quality of construction. The project has helped to establish common standards for all states across the country. The capacity of small local contractors to deliver works of the desired quality has been enhanced. Government engineering staff have also been exposed to global best practices in road construction.

Ongoing Maintenance Ensured: Contracts for road building have in-built 5 year maintenance contracts that ensure that the contractor builds a good quality road at the outset and continues to maintain it for five years thereafter.

Can't we speed-up the implementation?
The answer to this question is in affirmative if our political and bureaucratic set-up really want to implement it without corruption. And the answer is in negative if we base it on the present state of affairs of the governance.
The most common alibi of the government is that they lack sufficient resources, which is but only partially true.

Secondly, the quality of work, where there is no involvement of foreign agencies, is very poor.

For example, to assist the government of India in building rural roads in difficult regions, the World Bank's US$ 400 million Rural Roads Project is supporting the PMGSY in only select districts of Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh, where the quality of work and pace of implementation is relatively commendable.

A second World Bank project - Rural Roads Project II for US$ 500 million - is under preparation. It will support the building of rural roads in a few more states, including Bihar and Jammu and Kashmir.

However, this type of World Bank support falls short of the requirement of Indian villages, which are far more in numbers.

Government of India clearly needs more concerted efforts both in terms of availability of finance; its proper expenditure and implementation, if we really want to uplift the live conditions in Indian villages in record time. Simply giving higher priority to the work in hand can do it.