Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said that the pace of road construction under the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY) has been increased to 133 kilometres per day as compared to 73 kilometres per day during 2011-14. The total spend under this scheme for FY18 has been set at Rs 27,000 crore inclusive of state spending, Jaitley said while presenting the Union Budget 2017.
The PMGSY is a nationwide plan to provide rural areas with road connectivity.
He allocated a record Rs 3.96 lakh crore as the total outlay for infrastructure in the Union Budget 2017-18. This is much higher than the Rs 2.21 lakh crore set aside for in the previous budget as it also includes the allocation for Railways.
For 2017-18, the total capital and development expenditure of Railways has been pegged at Rs 1,31,000 crore. This includes Rs 55,000 crore provided by the government from the Budget. For highways, Jaitley said the budget allocation has been stepped up to Rs 64,000 crore in FY18 from Rs 57,676 crore. The government has set a target of developing 2,000 kilometres of coastal roads in the next financial year.
In his previous budget, Jaitley had earmarked Rs 97,000 crore towards roads and highways, including Rs 15,000 crore to be raised by the National Highway Authority of India through bond issuance. The NHAI had set a target of awarding 15,000 kilometres of new road projects by March 2017. However, in the first seven months of the fiscal, just 16 percent of the original target was achieved, according to a senior official of the NHAI's planning and statistics department.
Also Read: Budget 2017: Affordable Housing Gets Infrastructure Status, Higher Allocation At Rs 23,000 Crore
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