Rural road building picked up speed under NDA
Live MintThe Bharatiya Janata Party has made big promises on rural infrastructure in its 2019 election manifesto, just as it did in 2014. The government has, over the last five years, spent more than ₹80,000 crore on building and upgrading rural roads across the country, even as the PMGSY funding model has changed. In a 2019 working paper, Sam Asher of the World Bank and Paul Novosad of Dartmouth University combine PMGSY data with Socio-Economic Caste Census data to reveal that rural road construction does not generate massive economic benefits. Regardless of their impact, rural roads form the most important component of India’s road network. The BJP can take credit for increasing highway construction but, like with rural roads, whether this has the desired effect on the economy remains less clear.