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Rural roads for last mile connectivity -An Overview
Anand Venkatesh

One of the most formidable challenges facing the world today is poverty alleviation. And rural poverty happens to be a particularly daunting problem within the ambit of poverty alleviation. It is a major concern in Africa and South Asia. India, for instance, deemed to be one of the fastest growing economies, has a rural poverty share of 30.2 percent of the rural population (IFAD) amounting to 222 million people in rural areas. There are various causes of poverty. ADB (1999b) defines poverty as “a deprivation of essential assets and opportunities to which every human is entitled.” ADB (2005) has classified poverty into three kinds viz., transient, structural, and chronic. Transient poverty results from sudden shocks such as wars or natural disasters. Structural poverty arises mainly due to lack of opportunities. It affects people who are disconnected from the wider economy and society and is often geographically focused. Chronic poverty arises from a number of disabling factors at the individual or household level, including dependency, gender, caste and physical or mental disability. It can be seen that structural poverty is mainly caused by access deficit to various facilities.

Thus the key to overcoming structural poverty is the provisioning of adequate infrastructure and services. Donnges (2003) points to isolation being mainly responsible for poverty. Isolation is expressed by lack of access to basic, social and economic goods, facilities, and opportunities. At this juncture, it may be pertinent to define the problem of accessibility. Fyle (Geneva, 1998) defines accessibility as being determined by the location of different points of satisfaction on the one hand and people’s ability to reach these points. The problem is one of relative ease vis-à-vis time and cost with which a need can be satisfied. Rural access can be defined as the ability and the level of difficulty of rural people to use, reach, or obtain the necessary facilities, goods, or services. According to Lebo and Schelling (World Bank) the female literacy rate is 60 percent higher in villages with all-season access as compared to villages with unreliable access. It is a known fact that accessibility and poverty are negatively correlated. However, studies have also shown that a causal relationship exists between access and poverty.

Quite often, it has been observed that when measures have been introduced to provide rural access problems still exist in either overdesigning the intervention designing it so that it does meet even some minimum criteria. We now proceed to understand the rationale with which one should plan and design interventions for rural accessibility.

Basic Access and Rural Transport

The World Bank defines basic access as the minimum level of RTI network service required to sustain socioeconomic activity. The provision of basic access is thus viewed as a basic human right on the same lines as basic health and basic education. The basic access approach gives priority to the provision of reliable, all-season access to as many villages as possible over the upgrading of individual links to higher than basic access standard. In a particular country, the ability to provide basic access is limited by resources. Affordability, in the context of basic access, is the population’s capacity to maintain its basic access infrastructure over the long term. This depends on the complex relationship between local capacity, available skills, income levels, population density, geographic conditions, and political will.

Basic Access in the Indian Context

In India, the government has undertaken to provide rural accessibility by implementing the Prime Minister’s Rural Road Scheme (Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana-PMGSY). The objective of this scheme is to connect villages with all-weather access to unconnected habitations. An Unconnected Habitation is one with a population of designated size located at a distance of at least 500 metres or more (1.5 km of path distance in case of Hills) from an All-weather road or a connected Habitation. The entity under consideration is a habitation, not a village. Top priority is accorded to roads connecting populations of over 1000 followed by those connecting populations over 500 and then those over 250. Within this priority scheme, preference will be given to the roads connecting larger proportions of the population. However, in order to determine population size, it has been allowed that habitations within a radius of 500 metres (1.5 kilometres in case of hilly areas) can be clustered together for consideration of road access provision. This cluster approach should enable the provision of connectivity to a larger number of Habitations, particularly in the Hilly / mountainous areas.

A Core Network refers to the minimal Network of roads (routes) crucial to providing basic access to essential social and economic services to all eligible habitations in the selected areas through at least single all-weather road connectivity. Core Network comprises Through Routes and Link Routes. Through routes are the ones that collect traffic from several link roads or a long chain of Habitations and lead to Marketing centres either directly or through the higher category roads i.e., the District Roads or the State or National Highway. Link Routes are the roads connecting a single Habitation or a group of Habitations to Through Routes or District Roads leading to Market Centres. Link routes generally have dead ends terminating at a Habitation, while Through Routes arise from the confluence of two or more Link Routes and emerge onto a major road or to a Market Centre. The District Rural Roads Plan is expected to indicate the entire existing road network system in the District and also clearly identify the proposed roads for providing connectivity to U n c o n n e c t e d Habitations, in an economic and efficient manner in terms of cost and utility. The Core Network will identify the roads required to assure each eligible Habitation with a Basic Access (single all-weather road connectivity) to essential social and economic services. Accordingly, the Core Network would consist of some of the existing roads as well as all the roads proposed for new construction under the PMGSY. In proposing the new links under the District Rural Roads Plan, it would be first necessary to indicate the weightage for various services. The District Panchayat should be the competent authority to select the set of socio-economic / infrastructure variables best suited for the District, categorize them, and accord relative weightages to them. This would be communicated to all concerned before commencing the preparation of the District Rural Roads Plan. The Plan would first be prepared at the Block level, in accordance with the directions contained in the Manual and the priorities spelt out by the District Panchayat. In short, the existing road network would be drawn up, unconnected Habitations identified, and the roads required to connect these unconnected Habitations prepared. This shall constitute the Block Level Master Plan.

PMGSY has been instrumental in providing last mile connectivity for several villages in rural India. The key benefits of PMGSY include improved access to markets for selling agricultural produce, allseason connectivity for farmers, improvement in farm and non-farm employment opportunities, and overall improvement in the quality of life amongst rural communities. There has also been enhanced access to healthcare and educational services. Also, access to government services and visits by government officials have increased post construction of the PMGSY road. Thus the PMGSY roads have, by and large, been able to strengthen and diversify the livelihoods’ portfolio of rural communities.

Issues Associated With PMGSY

Though the PMGSY is unquestionably a step in the right direction, there are some issues associated with it, both at the policy design as well as implementation levels. A major issue is that completion targets in many states have still not been met. Another is the challenge to provide good roads at manageable construction costs. However, the key issue associated with PMGSY is one of maintenance. In fact, the lack of clear cut specifications on maintenance of the PMGSY roads could be construed as one of the biggest lacunae of the policy. Multiple agencies being responsible for designing and constructing PMGSY roads has led to a dilution of responsibility and lack of accountability as regards maintenance of these roads. Since the PMGSY roads are essentially low cost roads, they require sufficient maintenance for their sustainability. In the absence of an adequate maintenance management guideline, these roads are bound to deteriorate and hence would no longer serve their purpose. There are two differing views on maintenance. While one view is that roads are specialized subjects entailing centralized maintenance, the other is that rural roads essentially belong to the community which, in turn, should have a greater say in maintaining these roads. While both the views have merits it is imperative that the community be involved in the maintenance of rural roads. International experience suggests that the formation of citizen groups, the formation of road cooperatives, handing rural roads directly to the district panchayat are some of the ways to go ahead. Also, maintenance needs to be directly factored into the project’s technical and financial proposals. There should be clearly defined institutional arrangements for the maintenance with functions and functionaries. In fact, the Government of India has recently launched a PMGSY-II which largely, if not exclusively, focuses on the maintenance of rural roads. As per the specifications in the policy, the PMGSY roads ultimately need to be transferred to the district panchayats. However, progress has, at best, been slow in this regard. Last, but not the least, the policy implementation can be made far more robust and cost-effective by linking PMGSY road construction to other flagship programmes of the ministry such as the Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme.

The author can be contacted:  anand@irma.ac.in