THE NEW road runs 1.85km (1.14 miles) to Khaira, a village of around 1,000 people in central India that seems straight out of an idealised depiction of rural life. Blue-uniformed pupils eat lunch in the grounds of the middle school, some offering their leftovers to a pair of cows outside. A dozen men drink tea under the eaves of a house, listening to a recitation of the Ramayana blaring from a temple loudspeaker.
Until recently getting to Khaira from Kanharpuri, a bigger settlement, involved a roundabout route on potholed surfaces. But the new road, built at a cost of 2.9m rupees ($33,000) and completed in June, has made the commute much simpler, says Gita, a science teacher who travels from Kanharpuri on a scooter.
Since the turn of the century, and especially in the past decade under Narendra Modi, the prime minister, India has rapidly expanded its road connectivity. The national-highway network nearly tripled in length from 52,000km in 2000 to over 146,000km last year, adding an average of around 3,900km a year. Less well-known is the infrastructure revolution in the countryside. In 2000 India had just 545,000km of surfaced rural roads, usually of dubious quality. By last year, the country had added an additional 773,000km, at an annual average of 33,500km, under one programme alone (see chart).
That effort to link villages to market towns with all-weather roads, known as the Prime Minister’s Rural Roads Programme (PMGSY in the Hindi acronym), was announced in 2000. It is part of an effort to narrow the huge urban-rural income gap and has been supported by every government since. Some states also run a complementary chief minister’s programme (MMGSY). Today the orange-and-black signboard marking a road built under the scheme is a familiar sight across India.
The programme has by many measures been a success. PMGSY was rolled out on the basis of village population rather than by district, connecting smaller places over time. This design created a natural control group, allowing researchers to compare connected and unconnected villages near each other. They found reduced travel times, increased access to transport services, greater labour mobility out of agriculture and a slight rise in consumption. Pupils stayed in school longer.
Rural roads also improved life for women. A study by Bharti Nandwani and Punarjit Roychowdhury, both development economists, found fewer women needing permission to leave their homes and lower reported rates of domestic violence. The authors suggest that exposure to the world outside the village may have spurred changes in “the perception about the appropriate role of women in society”. Shilpa Aggarwal of the Indian School of Business (ISB) in Hyderabad found better health care for pregnant women, lower rates of miscarriage, fewer home births and higher rates of childhood vaccinations.
There remain many ills that roads alone cannot solve. Women did not report increased bank-account ownership or property rights. Infant mortality increased, suggesting that better maternal care only delayed rather than averted some deaths. Most glaringly, there is no evidence that the roads raised rural income levels.
One reason may be that much of the research on rural roads looks at effects over the first few years of the programme—it is harder to find unconnected villages today—and so the full impact on income may not yet have become apparent. Another is that rural roads facilitated migration, so incomes may well have risen for the families of those who left the village, but not for the rest. Both explanations point to possible economic improvements under the surface of aggregate numbers.
There may be a simpler explanation, says Sam Asher, an economist at Imperial College London who has done extensive research on PMGSY: “Villages are poor, unproductive places for many reasons and investing in one thing isn’t going to change a lot.” Agriculture, which remains the mainstay of India’s rural economy and employs half the country’s workforce, is afflicted by lots of bad policies. A tarmac road has no chance of fixing them on its own.
The programme has evolved since its inception. The latest edition, approved late last year, aims to build another 62,500km of road by 2029. “The focus now is going to shift to maintenance and to expansion,” says Vikram Sharma of MicroSave Consulting, a firm based in Lucknow. Maintenance is badly needed. “No one comes to inspect the road,” complains Champalal Chandrapur, a farmer in Khaira, referring to an older road at the other end of the village. “The scheme is very good, but the low-level contractors are corrupt.”
Indeed, corruption at the local level is endemic across India. Some roads are built with dodgy materials or mixes. Local politicians may prioritise funds for areas where they have more voters. Moreover, the capacity of Indian states to absorb central funding and implement schemes varies. Money sent by officials in Delhi is sometimes returned unspent. The government is adjusting the nitty-gritty of PMGSY’s policy design to ensure better oversight and maintenance, says Mr Sharma.
But rural India has changed for the better thanks to the programme. “Twenty years ago there used to be ankle-deep mud on the rough, unpaved roads,” says Tejinder Vaishnav, a labourer in Khaira. The scheme may not be perfect. But as Ms Aggarwal of ISB puts it, “a road is a no-brainer. Everyone should have access to a road.”■
Stay on top of our India coverage by signing up to Essential India, our free weekly newsletter.