Henceforth, seamless connectivity and not the habitation will be the yardstick for construction of rural roads in Maoist-affected areas under the Pradhan Mantri Gramin Sadak Yojana (PMGSY). The Central Government has tweaked the rules to ensure unhindered movement of security forces, locals as well as Government officials in the Naxal hotbeds.
The Government is also hopeful that improving the road connectivity under the project will bring locals out of physical and functional isolation. Suitable road connectivity will create confidence in the governance structures, create job opportunity, uplift living standard and thus help to keep the local populace away from the lWE activities, , a senior official from the Rural Development Ministry said.
Till now, for most integrated Action Plan (IAP) blocks, as identified by Home Ministry, the unconnected habitations with population 100 and above (as per 2001 Census) were eligible to be covered under the PMGSY.
The scheme also permitted upgradation (to prescribed standards) of existing rural roads in districts where all the eligible habitations of the designated population size have been provided all weather road connectivity.
However, following approval of the `17,000 crore "Rural Connectivity Project for lWE Affected Areas" (RCPlWEAA) covering the 35 districts that account for 90 per cent of left-wing extremist violence last year, the population of the habitations will not be taken into consideration, as the primary objective is providing seamless connectivity for locals, Government officials and the security forces in the lWE affected and adjoining areas, the official added.
Over 5,400km of roads and 126 bridges are proposed to be built under the RCPlWEAA programme as a vertical to the PMGSY.
"The project will cover the rural roads (RR), village roads (VR), other district roads (ODR) and major districts roads (MDR) which are critical from the security point of view which have been identified by the Home Ministry of the identified states and the security forces engaged in combating the lWE violence and rehabilitating the affected population," said the official.
The likely duration of implementation of the project is four years from 2016-17 to 2019-20.
Also, with naxals blowing up fully constructed concrete and bituminous roads in their areas of influence, the Ministry has now allowed road works to be finished in two stages.
Since inception in 2000, projects for providing new connectivity to connect 1,56,273 numbers of eligible habitations measuring road length of 589,778.41 km have been sanctioned with an estimated cost of `209,548.35 crore including upgradation. A total of 492,000 km road has been constructed and new connectivity has been provided to over 121,241 habitations upto December, 2016 by the States.