Prime Minister of India - Dr. Manmohan Singh

PM reviews Bharat Nirman

The Prime Minister chaired a meeting yesterday, to review two components of Bharat Nirman programme - Rural Telephony and Rural Roads.

It was noted the performance of extending telephony to the rural areas was progressing extremely well with the Bharat Nirman target of providing every village with telephone connectivity likely to be achieved by November 2007 - about two years ahead of schedule. Out of the 66,822 villages, 48,125 have been covered till May 2007 and the remaining will be covered by November 2007.

When completed 14183 villages will be connected through satellite technology the rest through other technologies. And in an an effort to increase rural teledensity about 80,000 towers will be installed by May 2008 to facilitate mobile and other wireless services in rural areas. Efforts are also on to provide Broadband services to cover 2 lakh villages inn 5000 blocks across the country. The final goal is to create five crore rural connections by 2007 and increase this to 8 crore connections by 2010 and provide broadband connections in every village by 2012.

The performance of the Rural Roads has been satisfactory with around 40,000 km of new link roads having been built and 50,000 kms of existing rural roads being upgaraded in the first two years (2005-2007) of Bharat Nirman. Against the Bharat Nirman target of connecting 66,802 villages with all weather roads 13,831 villages have been connected.

It was noted that nine states of Assam, Bihar, Chatitisagarh, Jharkand, MP,Orissa, Rajasthan, UP, and West Bengal account for 90 percent of the remaining coverage. Among these Rajasthan and MP are well on course while Jharkhand, Bihar, Orissa, Assam, and West Bengal are to gain momentum. The Prime Minster has written to the Chief Ministers of all the states to ensure targets are met and they have assured action.