The NDA government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi has not only laid out more rural roads in the last five years but has also built them much faster than the Manmohan Singh-led UPA governments, reports Mint.

The road transport and highways ministry, led by the energetic minister Nitin Gadkari, has spent more than Rs 80,000 crores on building and upgrading rural roads across the country.

With such massive investment, nearly two lakh kilometres of new roads have come up in rural India since 2014. This works out to 109 km of rural roads constructed per day. This rate of road construction is much faster than those recorded under the previous UPA regimes - while the UPA-II built 102km per day, UPA-I paved 89km of roads a day.

Another area where the PM Modi government excels is in reducing the turnaround time for project completion. While it took two years to build rural roads between 2008 and 2011, the same work was done by the NDA government in just six months or in only 25 per cent of the time taken by the UPA II government.

Also when the Narendra Modi government assumed power in 2014, only 55 per cent of India’s habitations had access to a road. At the end of January 2019, around 91 per cent of India’s villages is now connected by roads.

Fastest Highway Developer

Speaking to Members of Parliament in the Lok Sabha as part of his budget address on 1 February, the then Finance Minister (FM) Piyush Goyal mentioned that under the current administration India had become the world’s fastest highway developer.

He said that the Modi government built highways at the rate of 27 km per day, making it the fastest in the world.

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