India Rural Infrastructure

This site provides detail information on India Rural Infrastructure. The site also focuses on the objectives and activities of Ministry of Rural Infrastructure Government of India.

India's economic growth and development is predicated to a large extent upon the development of its 700-million strong rural population. Majority of the population lives in about 600,000 small villages and are engaged primarily in agriculture, directly or indirectly. A substantial portion of India's current agricultural labor force has to move to non-agriculture sectors for incomes in all sectors to go up. The challenge is to manage the transition of 80% of the rural population from a village-centric agricultural-based economy to a industry based economy.
Grey areas of India Rural Infrastructure -

• A set of basic facts define the constraints within which the economic growth and development of India's rural population must be addressed. Fundamentally, they relate to resource constraints, the nature of infrastructure, and the future trajectory of the geographical distribution of the population.


• These services includes, at a minimum market access, educational, health, financial, entertainment, transportation, and communications. Further, services depend on the availability of infrastructure.


• Infrastructure investment is irregular and inadequate to support 600,000 villages and the average cost of providing infrastructure is inversely related to the scale of the operation.


• Limitations on the financial and other resources available for providing infrastructure made it impossible to provide infrastructure at every village in India. Even if they were provided at every village, it will not be commercially sustainable.
• The basic geographical structure of population distribution will change once India shifts from being agriculture based country to industry based nation.

The Government has launched " Bharat Nirman" for the development of rural infrastructure. Plans proposed for the development of India Rural Infrastructure are -

• Irrigation,
• Roads,
• Housing,
• Water Supply,
• Electrification,
• Telecommunication Connectivity.

The task ahead for the development of India Rural Infrastructure are -

• To connect 66,800 habitations with population over 1000 with all weather roads.
• To construct 1,46,000Km of new rural roads.
• To upgrade and modernize 1,94,000Km of existing rural roads.
• Total investment of ` 1,74,000 crore envisaged under "Bharat Nirman", investment on rural roads estimated to be at ` 48,000 crore.
• To provide corpus of ` 8000 crore to Rural Infrastructure Development Fund (RIDF).

Last updated On: 7^th May 2011

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