Country's rural road network has expanded over seven times at 3.89 lakh kilometres in the last ten years of UPA-I and UPA-II regime, Finance Minister P Chidambaram said today.
"In the year 2004, the country's rural road network was 51,511 km which has now reached 3,89,578 km today," he said in his Interim Budget speech.
"We have added highways and rural roads under the PMGSY (Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana)," Chidambaram said.
Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY) was launched on December 25, 2000 as a fully funded Centrally Sponsored Scheme to provide all weather road connectivity in rural areas of the country.
The programme envisages connecting all habitations with a population of 500 persons and above in the plain areas and 250 persons and above in hill states, tribal and desert areas.
"We have given a big push to infrastructure and capacity addition in infrastructure industries in 2012-13. In the nine months of the current fiscal (2013-14) we have added 3,928 km of National Highways, 39,144 km of rural roads under PMGSY," he added.
In February 2013, the Cabinet approved updation of the PMGSY to allow revision of the core network to include left-out habitations.
"To encourage domestic production of specified road construction machinery, I propose to withdraw the exemption from CVD (countervailing duty) on similar imported machinery," Chidambaram said in his speech.
