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Road connections to +38,484 villages above 1000 population and all 20,867 habitations above 500 population in hilly and tribal areas.

Bharat Nirman - Rural Roads
To upgrade rural infrastructure, the Government of India has conceived a time-bound business plan under Bharat Nirman. It is a flagship programme for the country. A commitment of over Rs.1,74,000 crores has been made to Bharat Nirman with the objective of unleashing the growth potential of our villages. As part of the programme, Government of India intends that by end of financial year 2008 – 2009, every village of over 1000 population, or over 500 in hilly and tribal areas, has an all-weather road.
To achieve the targets of Bharat Nirman, 1,46,185 kms. of road length is proposed to be constructed by 2009. This will benefit 66,802 unconnected eligible habitations in the country. To ensure full farm to market connectivity, it is also proposed to upgrade 1,94,132 kms. of the existing Associated Through Routes. A sum of approximately Rs.48,000 crore is proposed to be invested to achieve this

The Rural Road Programme has taken many new initiatives and established several new standards in its endeavour to construct roads of the highest possible quality. The new initiatives taken as part of the programme include the following.

Formulation of District Rural Roads Plan - For the first time systematic District Rural Roads Plans have been prepared listing out the complete network of all roads in the district i.e., Village Roads, Major District Roads, State Roads and National Highways. The concept of Core Network has been operationalised for the first time in order to focus on the set of roads which are considered essential to provide connectivity to all habitations of the desired size. The Core Network is the basic instrumentality for prioritization of construction and allocation of funds for maintenance. Action has been initiated to develop GIS-based applications to further enhance the utility of the Core Network, and discussion has been held with C-DAC for the purpose.

Preparation of a 20 years Vision Document - The Indian Roads Congress has been requested to prepare a 20 years perspective plan for rural roads in consultation with the State Governments in order to give policy direction and to identify management, technical and capacity issues that need to be addressed. The Document is likely to be ready by November, 2005.

Consultation with public representatives - The PMGSY has an inbuilt mechanism for consultation with public representatives from Panchayat to Parliament at various points of the programme.Consultations with Members of Parliament are held at both the Core Network finalisation and Annual Proposals stages.In addition, at the stage of preparing DPRs, the DPIU conducts a transect walk along the road alignment, involving the local Panchayat.

Rural Roads Manual - Following the launch of the PMGSY, the Ministry of Rural Development constituted 3 Committees in January 2001 to go into various aspects of rural road construction and the manuals on these different aspects brought out by the committees were combined into a separate ‘Rural Roads Manual’ and published as an IRC publication (IRC:SP 20-2002) in supercession of an earlier manual. This Manual is now the basis of all works under the PMGSY.

Book of Specifications and Standard Data Book - In order to streamline the process of estimating and to standardise contracts, a separate Book of Specification and a Standard Data Book has been prepared for rural roads.This replaces the publication brought out by the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, and will be in consonance with the Rural Roads Manual. States will prepare the Annual Schedule of Rates (SoR) for rural roads based on these documents.

Standard Bidding Documents - To standardise the PMGSY works tendering process in the States, a Standard Bidding Document has been prepared and has been sent to the States for adoption and use in all PMGSY road tenders.

Computerised Online management, monitoring and accounting system (OMMAS) - For the first time a nation-wide programme is being managed and monitored online. Special application software has been developed by C-DAC which envisages that the DPIUs will upload the data regarding the road proposals and construction progress comprising both physical and financial data on to the PMGSY website. The data will be used for decision making, and for transactional decisions, monitoring accounting and analysis. This serves as an effective tool for management and planning at District, State and National level. From 2003-04 onwards, updating the website is a pre-requisite for availing funds under the Programme. The system also aims at providing complete transparency to the programme. In the Citizen Section on the programme web-site viz. www.omms.nic.in any citizen can access any information and can offer comments, make complaints or submit queries related to the programme.

Training - To build up capacity and capability, training to more than 5,000 AEs & JEs of different states has been imparted. Training is also planned for Contractor’s engineers and workmen. This is being funded out of the World Bank TA loan.

Use of new technology and materials - Rural Roads have been a neglected sector. The focus given to it through the PMGSY is now enabling the canalization of R&D efforts to this sector. Use of cement concrete, modified bitumen, fly ash as well as soil stabilization techniques and other new methodologies, including Waste Plastic are all be pursued.

Quality consciousness - The execution of programme has brought to light that the rural roads sector requires enormous emphasis on quality control and management if the effort is to succeed.A 3-tier quality control system has been put in place including 2 level of independent quality monitoring. For the first time a concerted effort is being made to ensure that testing facilities at the contractor’s level and executing agency level is brought to a high standard that enables measurement of quality at site. A Quality Control Handbook has been published for specific application to rural roads construction.

Outsourcing of technical and management inputs - In order to manage the programme at the national level and yet ensure that adequate technical inputs are locally available for planning and execution of rural roads programme, an elaborate structure consisting of Principal Technical Agencies (national level technical institutions) as well as State Technical Agencies (regional level technical institutions) has been successfully brought into the framework of the programme planning and execution through a Government – academia partnership. Project Implementation Consultants (PIC) and Project Management Consultants are being outsourced on ACBS basis to help States expand implementational capacity.

Rural Road Safety - The State Governments have been requested that the Head of the DPIUs may be included into the District Rural Road Safety Committee and the State Quality Coordinator for PMGSY may be nominated to the State Roads Safety Council and to issue suitable instructions to ensure that these institutions meet with the requisite frequency.

Maintenance - The roads are constructed by the State Governments and are to be maintained by them. The State Government are required to furnish a certificate to the effect that the provision of funds for maintenance has been made in the State Budget separately for PMGSY Roads. The State Government willalso be required to give approval for routine maintenance of every work in the proposal.The estimates of each work under PMGSY will be made in two parts.The first part will be the estimate for Construction of the Road and the second part will be the estimate of year wise routine maintenance for 5 years. In respect of rural Through Routes taken up under PMGSY there will be a second 5-year maintenance contract on Batch basis, in order to cover the design life of 10 years.