Road to development: Modi’s rural road scheme uses good tech, but plagued by poor quality

A country’s vision for the future is typically shown through glitzy skyscrapers, sprawling cities, and ultramodern settlement. In India, it’s a little different. 

Ninety crore Indians – roughly 65 percent of the total population – live in villages. And the most obvious indicator of their economic development is the humble road. 

The road offers access to education, healthcare, trade, employment and other drivers of development. The road offers connectivity, both geographically and metaphorically. And it’s the road that is the target of Narendra Modi’s ambitious investment programme – the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana, which aims to provide all-weather road connectivity to eligible habitations in rural India.

PMGSY was initially launched under the Vajpayee government in 2000, with a second phase rolling out in 2013. Under Modi, the scheme was first expanded in 2016 and then a third phase of it rolled out in 2019.

While we’ll unpack the scheme and its successes in detail, here’s what we can conclude definitively on PMGSY.

• 7.6 lakh km of rural roads built over two decades at a cost of nearly Rs 32 lakh crore.

• The UPA did better compared to the NDA in terms of new rural roads built but the NDA executed new verticals to consolidate existing roads.

• Poor quality of road construction has significantly hampered overall delivery and intended purpose.

• There was good use of technology under the Modi administration in route selection and quality monitoring.

Let’s get to it.

Step one: PMGSY-I in 2000

The target of PMGSY-I was habitations – referring to a cluster of population living in an area over time – and not villages. When it was launched, it was estimated that 3.3 lakh habitations had no all-weather road access. So, it aimed to provide all-weather road connectivity to previously unconnected habitations.

It covered those with a population of over 500 in the plains, population over 250 in the Northeastern and Himalayan states, and some areas with populations of over 100 that were impacted by Naxalism.

The government’s target was to connect all habitations with at least 1,000 people by 2003, those with at least 500 people would be connected by 2007.

As it turns out, it was only in 2022 – a full 15 years after the original 2007 deadline – that the scheme achieved 99 percent coverage, providing roads to over 1.62 lakh habitations. The government blamed the delay on the following challenges:

Importantly, the scope of PMGSY-I was based on 2001 census data and India’s population has grown tremendously since then, implying a greater number of habitations too. Yet there’s been no initiative to expand the programme’s scope. Instead, follow-on efforts focus on improving and consolidating key routes. 

Given PMGSY-I spanned both the UPA and NDA, we can compare its performance under each. Data shows that peak construction happened between 2009 and 2011, which coincided with the Manmohan Singh government. Outside that peak period, more roads were constructed under the UPA than NDA.

Even if we discount 2023-24, when road construction fell sharply since the scheme was near complete, the annual average for roads constructed under PMGSY-I is 33,415 km per year under the UPA as against just 24,537 km per year under the NDA.

When schemes near completion, it’s understandable that numbers dip, which might explain this. Even so, the UPA comes out better than the NDA in its implementation of PMGSY-I. 

Step two: PMGSY-II in 2013

Phase two, or PMGSY-II, was launched in 2013 to upgrade existing rural roads based on their economic potential. Its aim was to improve the quality of 50,000 km of select routes that catered to large populations and carried higher volumes of traffic. 

As noted by the 12th Finance Commission, “It is far more important to ensure that assets already created are maintained and yield services as originally envisaged than to go on undertaking commitments for creating more assets.”

PMGSY-II’s target was March 2020, later extended to September 2022. As we publish this piece, this goal is mostly met, with a total of 48,962 km built against a sanctioned length of 48,326 km. UPA vs NDA is not comparable in this instance because the phase began just a year before Modi came to power.

Step three: RCPLWEA in 2016

A new vertical under PMGSY was launched in 2016 to focus on areas affected by “left-wing extremism”. This was called the Road Connectivity Project for Left Wing Extremism Affected Areas – the unmemorable abbreviation of RCPLWEA for short. 

It spanned 44 districts in nine states – Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Maharashtra, Telangana and Uttar Pradesh – with a target in 2019-20.

The deadline was extended to March 2023. At the time of publishing, a quarter of sanctioned roads are still unfinished. The most completion is recorded in Bihar (93 percent), Jharkhand and Odisha (86 percent), Maharashtra (82 percent) and Uttar Pradesh (81 percent). Significant delinquents are Madhya Pradesh (24 percent) and Telangana (42 percent).

The Ministry of Rural Development last year blamed delays on law and order, forest clearance issues, and nonavailability of contractors in states.

Step four: PMGSY-III

In July 2019, soon after Modi’s reelection to power, his government announced a third iteration of PMGSY. PMGSY-III focuses on improving existing roadways rather than building new ones. 

PMGSY-III targets 1.25 lakh km of rural roads that are critical routes, accessing agricultural markets, schools, hospitals and administrative buildings. Its target is less than three percent of India’s total rural roads (over 45 lakh km).

A key differentiator from previous steps is that PMGSY-III heavily relies on modern technology such as geographic information systems, geo-tagging, and mobile surveys, trace maps and satellite images. 

PMGSY-III aims to complete by March 2025. Given that we’re in the final year of a six-year project, it should be 84 percent done, assuming a uniform annual pace of completion. But at the time of publishing this report, the total length of roads constructed under PMGSY-III is 78,492 km – about 63 percent of the initial target of 1.25 lakh. Moreover, only 1.15 lakh km has been approved so far, which doesn’t augur well for the scheme’s timely completion.

When asked about the slow progress, government officials said they were “optimistic” as the construction of these roads were unlikely to “take much time”.

That said, PMGSY-III’s delays are nowhere as egregious as PMGSY-I. But there’s a stark difference in state-wise performance. Eighty percent of sanctioned roads are already constructed in states like Assam, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Gujarat, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Odisha and Uttar Pradesh. At the other extreme, states like Mizoram, Manipur and Sikkim are yet to complete a single road and even bigger states like Kerala, Uttarakhand, and Himachal Pradesh have completed less than 30 percent of approved roads.

Funds and concerns

Before we detail concerns, it’s important to remember that PMGSY was launched in 2000 as a 100 percent centrally sponsored scheme. In 2015-16, the Modi government changed it to 60 percent by the centre and 40 percent by the state, except for eight Northeastern and three Himalayan states where the share is 90:10.

Building over 7.6 lakh km of rural roads over two decades has cost India nearly Rs 3.2 lakh crore (including state spending).  At the centre, the NDA spent

Rs 1.79 lakh crore from 2014 to 2024, while the UPA spent Rs 0.95 lakh crore during its decade in power. 

When adjusted for inflation to a common baseline year (2011)  for an apples-to-apples comparison, the spending numbers are almost identical – Rs 1.1 lakh crore for the UPA vs Rs 1.25 lakh crore crore for the NDA. Thus, spending in “real” rupees was  marginally higher during the NDA term, but one must account for the much bigger size of the economy during their term. Spending as a ratio of the GDP, a more appropriate metric for comparative analysis across different years, was almost double during the UPA years. The Manmohan government averaged spending 0.144 percent of the GDP on rural roads, whereas for the Modi government that figure stands at 0.0833 percent. 

Now, has this funding delivered what was intended?

A glaring weakness of PMGSY has been the quality of roads. In 2022, a standing committee on rural development said the quality was “completely unacceptable”, using “poor road materials”, unable to “sustain the rigours of weather and traffic even for one season”, and “washed away with the onset of monsoon”.

This can be considered a “punitive act”, it added.

There are four distinct reasons related to scheme design and implementation that contribute to this state of affairs.

Contracting woes

The process of awarding PMGSY building contracts to private vendors needs to be reexamined. As things stand, scheme guidelines require interested parties to bid for PMGSY work using a standard bidding document. Work is awarded to the lowest bidder. The contractor who gets the tender is instrumental in determining the quality of roads.

This system – known as the L1 system – basically incentivises low bidding to get a contract, which leads to contractors compromising the quality of work to justify the low bids. To manage costs, contractors often sublet the work to smaller contractors who are even less conscious of maintaining quality, leading to a negative cascading effect.

Broken monitoring mechanism

The quality monitoring system of PMGSY is broken. In theory, a compromise in road construction due to contractor malfeasance should be flagged and rectified by quality checks conceived in the scheme. 

To that end, PMGSY defines in great detail a three-tiered quality control mechanism to ensure the construction of quality roads and the durability of road assets. The government also has an app called “Meri Sadak” where users can flag defects in roads.

But the standing committee in 2022 noted numerous instances of PMGSY projects where stakeholders bypassed monitoring mechanisms, resulting in poor construction quality and road maintenance. Notably, the mandatory provision of laboratories – which serve as the first tier of quality control – was violated in numerous instances. These on-site labs are meant for the assessment of the quality of roads, the stones that have been used, etc. The standing committee report indicates alleged non-existence or non-functioning of these labs at many locations through the first-hand ground experience of its members.

Post-construction maintenance

Third, even when roads are constructed per stipulated standards, maintenance has been often found lacking. 

The usual design life of roads constructed under PMGSY is 10 years. For the first five years, known as the defect liability period, the road contractor is responsible for its maintenance. Subsequently, responsibility shifts to state governments.

According to the standing committee, contractors frequently violate the maintenance provision, resulting in damaged PMGSY roads. Though the scheme articulates penalties for such violations, infractors rarely face any meaningful consequences for their lapses. 

The standing committee urged the Department of Rural Roads to take an “iron-fisted approach for stricter implementation of such provisions”, where erring contractors should be black-listed and deemed ineligible for future contracts. 

Another issue is the lack of available maintenance funds once the state government is responsible for it. Forty-one percent of total roads are categorised as ‘poor’ or ‘very poor’, largely attributed to the non-provisioning of adequate funds for maintenance by the state government. Although the maintenance of roads under PMGSY is the responsibility of states, the states have been requesting the centre to provide funds for the maintenance of PMGSY roads. 

As such, the Ministry of Rural Development approached the 15th Finance Commission, which has the authority to allocate funding, to provide grants to the states for the maintenance of PMGSY roads. As a result, the commission in its report recommended Rs 27,539 crore for maintenance of PMGSY roads for the years 2021-26, out of which Rs 14,743 crore is for the general states and Rs 12,796 crore is for the Northeastern and hilly states. 

A seamless flow of these funds to states will help alleviate some of the states’ financial burden vis-a-vis maintenance but will require better coordination between the centre and the states, which has already been flagged as an area of improvement by the standing committee report.

Better road specifications

Finally, the specifications of PMGSY roads need to be bolstered. The current specs require PMGSY roads to be 20 mm thick. This thickness is acceptable for regular traffic. But what has transpired is that heavy machinery used for building the National Highway network often uses PMGSY roads, which then causes much damage to the roads which are not robust enough to bear such loads. The spectre of weak, rural roads buckling under the weight of building bright shiny highways is perhaps a striking metaphor of the current times. 

The standing committee recommends increasing the thickness of roads under PMGSY to 30 mm to solve the load-bearing problem. Given that most roads under PMGSY-I are already built, this recommendation seems of limited utility. 

Their other suggestion – of urgent meaningful dialogue with the National Highways Authority of India to ensure that the PMGSY road damage by NHAI vehicles gets mitigated and the damages are repaired by NHAI – is more pragmatic.

It should be noted that the Modi government tried to address some of the scheme shortcomings highlighted above by using technology. These include using satellite images to monitor road progress, introducing the Meri Sadak app to empower citizens to monitor and report roadways, and using a robust web management framework to track road completion and spending. But better tech cannot substitute the hard work needed on the ground, across all levels of government, to plug the holes that have been flagged.

Other than the quality challenges discussed above, there is one other blind spot of this scheme – coverage. The original list of habitations to be included in PMGSY-I was derived from the 2000 census. Since then, there has been new published data from the 2011 census, and an upcoming census in the near future. Given the population growth since 2000, it is safe to say that many new habitations would have emerged that were not covered under the original scheme and continue to be left out in the subsequent verticals. The government should consider introducing a new vertical to provide connectivity to those that are currently excluded. 

As India embarks on the journey to transform into a developed nation by 2047, both the public and the policymakers will do well to remember that  while slick expressways and sealinks may be markers that make us beam with pride, the path to widespread prosperity goes through the unassuming village road.

Infographics by Gobindh VB.

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