Roads, Highways, Expressways, and other connecting roads are very important for easy movement of traffic from one place to another. As it is a very natural and obvious mindset that City Streets are in better condition than the Highways connecting the Rural Areas. Whereas, according to me, the reality is completely opposite to this in the current scenario.

The government from the last 4-5 years is very actively working for maintaining the Rural Highways and connecting maximum villages to the highways. No doubt it is a very good initiative by the government, as it is also very important to develop and maintain the outer highways connecting cities. For increasing the rural areas connectivity government initiated the PMGSY (Pradhan Mantri Gramin Sadak Yojana) scheme. The scheme has been introduced in the year 2000, but the governments of that time didn’t work well. But if we compare the work of the last 4 years with the work done before 2014, everyone had noticed a sea of changes in the highways connecting rural areas.

It is really a very commendable effort by the present government as they successfully connected about 70% of rural areas till now of such a vast country with different terrains by roads under a single scheme. It is very easy to criticize the work of any government, but why so, if a huge number of population is getting benefited with these types of initiatives. As well as, the quality of these highways is far better than that little work done by the previous governments.

The connectivity of rural areas with the highways will benefit the people of that area in many ways. They could start their business like dhabas, restaurants, local handloom and handicrafts, and many more things. The Indian culture is very rich, so it will automatically attract people to spend their little time at the new and rural area, which increases the business in rural areas.

Whereas, on the other hand, we can’t ignore the condition of roads in cities. Focusing on a single point will not mark the overall improvement in the country or in any specific state. But, the city streets conditions are quite like that, that they are ignored by the authorities at this primary stage. It’s not like that governments have completely ignored the maintenance of city streets. But yes, the quality of roads has been compromised.

As the streets in cities are in huge demand for their expansion due to increasing traffic and congestion. But this has been on hold for a long time. Despite all this, the government can’t be blamed completely for this. The bad condition of roads also arises due to commuters. ‘Overloading’ is one of the major reason for the damages of roads, and the compromised quality of the road is just like the icing on the cake.

But if we being realistic and then think about both the conditions, after this, I would say, the work is appreciable because everything can’t be done in a single go. So, being judgmental on just witnessing the work progress of 4-5 years would be unjustified with the government. The basic reason behind saying this is, working for change and for such a vast country, and over that expecting changes in only 4-5 years is not right.

Infrastructural improvement or any type of change implementation at a huge level don’t show complete make-over in a short span of 4-5 years. It is not a kind of magic that, in just a flick of fingers things get changed.