In the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY), Odisha has been the second from bottom in completion of sanctioned road length in the country.
More importantly, how the PMGSY works in Odisha are in a mess could well be ascertained from the fact that for the two consecutive years of 2014-15 and 2015-16, a whopping of 989 proposals worth over Rs 1,400 crore from the State didn’t get green signals from the Inter-Ministerial Committee headed by the Union Rural Development Secretary. The reason: the State’s proposals lacked approval from the competent authorities like the National Rural Road Development Agency (NRDDA), and, even at times, by the State Technical Agencies (STAs) for not conforming to the proposed PMGSY guidelines.
The result: Odisha failed to add even 1 km of road length to the sanctioned of over 51,000 km of road length for it till 2013-14.
And the interesting fact is when Odisha figured among the nine States (Assam, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jammu & Kashmir, Jharkhand, Odisha, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand and West Bengal) where the PMGSY projects have been pending for more than four years,. Even among the nine dubious States, Odisha’s scoring rate is only better than strife-torn J&K, and Jharkhand.
The obvious fallout is Odisha could see a completion of 38,608 km of road length till 2016-end of the total sanctioned length, which is around 75 per cent against the national average of over 83 per cent. Even among the so-called BIMARU (Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh) States, Odisha fared the worst in the rural roads completion rate.
Highly-placed sources in Rural Development Department have ascribed the reasons behind the slow execution of PMGSY in Odisha to low execution capacity of the State, delay in land acquisition and Maoist problem. However, an analysis reveals that Chhattisgarh, which is the Maoist hotbed in the country, has a completion rate of around 82 per cent. This brings to fore that land acquisition and poor execution capacity have been bogging down the PMGSY projects in Odisha.
The fallout on people: Odisha till the end of year 2016 could provide road connectivity to around 63 per cent of the eligible habitations under the PMGSY against the national average, including J&K and North-Eastern States, of over 65 per cent.
It is for this reason that Odisha couldn’t enlist itself for funds under PMGSY-II as it failed to ensure 100-per cent completion of new projects and 80-per cent completion of renovation works in existing roads.
However, the major concern for the Odisha Government is that the Union Rural Development Ministry has set a target of 2019 to see completion of a whopping around 18,000-km sanctioned PMGSY road length in the State, which means around 9,000-km road length every year when the scoring rate of Odisha is around 3,000 to 4,000km per year.