World Bank, ADB loans for rural roads

The World Bank and the Asian Development Bank have agreed to provide about $800 million (approximately Rs 3,500 crore) for the development of rural roads. Of this, the World Bank will give $300 million and ADB will give $500 million.

The funds are likely to flow in this year, coinciding with the launch of Phase-III of the Pradhan Mantri Gramin Sadak Yojana.

This was revealed by Rural Development Minister Ananth Kumar during the meeting of the parliamentary consultative committee attached to his ministry.

"This will be the first in the series of loans for the Pradhan Mantri Gramin Sadak Yojana," he said.

The scheme is a Rs 60,000 crore (RS 600 billion) programme sponsored by the government to link around 160,000 unconnected habitations with all-weather roads. It was launched in December 2000. The other will be taken up later.

The Phase-III would involve programmes of linking villages with all-weather roads in five states -- Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Haryana and Mizoram.

While the ADB finance would go to Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh that of the World Bank would also cover some of the on-going projects in Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Jharkhand and Himachal Pradesh.

So far, project proposals for Phase-I (2000-01) for Rs 2490.40 crore (Rs 24.9 billion) and Phase-II for Rs 5167.67 crore (Rs 51.67 billion) in 28 states and Union territories have been cleared by the rural development ministry. For Phase-III only five states' proposals have so far been approved.

Some states were considered ineligible for funding in 2002-03 for reasons like poor quality of roads or inaction in implementing the programme.

These include Bihar, Manipur, Jharkhand and Uttaranchal. A few of them will get the resources in the current financial year.

Kumar said his ministry had revised guidelines and established several new standards to ensure construction of roads of highest possible quality.

A three-tier quality control system had been put in place under which state and national level monitors had been appointed. At the third tier, the quality monitoring would be done by the National Rural Roads Development Agency.

Besides, for the first time systematic districts rural roads plans had been prepared listing the complete network of all roads in each district, including village roads and national highways, the minister said.