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India’s villages: for want of a road:
Context:
- Roads of rural India today continue to be severely constrained when it comes to everyday travel and mobility.
Explanation:
- Around 40% of the villages in India lacked all-weather connectivity, constraining them when it came to mobility. This placed limits upon their economic well-being
The gradual shift:
- Using Census data, it found that in the 2001-11 period, annual inter-state migration stood at about 5-6.5 million.
- Since then, this number has jumped to around nine million according to the Survey’s analysis of railway passenger data.
- Importantly, this labour migration growth rate is accelerating. In the 1991-2001 decade, it stood at around 2.4%, nearly doubled to 4.5% in 2001-11 and has grown since.
- Such labour flows usually accompany structural transformation of the economy—“the release of surplus labour from relatively low-productive agricultural activities to sectors enjoying higher productivity.”
Remaining drawbacks:
- Problems still remains, such as poor quality of construction and maintenance.
- Until December 2010, the quality of rural roads ranged from acceptable to extremely bad as per the World Bank.
- Poor planning in Indian governance—continues to be another obstacle.
