199
annual contribution of
`
20,000 crore may appear miniscule, but the Fund’s
outstanding sanctions have already reached
`
161,730 crore or drawn amount
of
`
113,924 crore which may operationally belong to the latest five tranches
or so. The Government’s Bharat Nirman programme launched in 2005, has
envisaged construction of 146,185 Kms of new rural roads (Eleventh Five Year
Plan, p.259). Whereas the RIDF investments are said to have already created
354,344 Kms of rural roads (see Table 6.12).
In the above sense, RIDF contribution appears very sizeable. There
is hardly any mention of these programmes in the five-year plan documents
except a solitary reference in the Eleventh Five Year Plan (2007-2012) Vol III
(p.301) in the following box item:
Box 1: Some Options of Resource Mobilization for Rural Roads
Domestic Borrowings
: Recently, NABARD in India has come up in a significant
way to provide loan assistance for construction of rural roads in several States
under RIDF programme. As the financial institution like NABARD may not have the
requisite technical expertise, it may be worthwhile to consider providing NABARD
loans with technical and management inputs of NRRDA. This would enhance the
financial and technical discipline, as well as help in adoption of uniform standards
for these roads, on the lines of the PMGSY. This can be channelized by transferring
the total loan amount to a pool to be availed of by the States under guidelines similar
to that of PMGSY [Eleventh Five Year Plan 2007-2012 Vol III, p.301]
Be that as itmay, RIDF is a highly innovative programme for strengthening
rural infrastructure which is facing gigantic gaps, both in adding new capacities
and maintaining the existing ones. Of late, key features of RIDF operations
seem encouraging as states are appearing to be enthusiastic, and despite their
statutory borrowing limitations and administrative constraints in absorbing
investments in general, their offtake of RIDF loans has improved. Secondly,
unlike in the initial phases (I-XI tranches), projects selection by NABARD across
states has been more judicious and
egalitarian
, with a distinctly larger share
being allotted to less developed and the north-eastern states. Finally, evaluation
reports from outside agencies as well as NABARD’s internal monitoring of
projects for deriving estimates of economic and social benefits, have produced
encouraging results. As referred to above, the most pertinent result seen in
terms of increased absorption of ground-level credit is indeed noteworthy.
When such is the case, the sudden pushing up of the Bank rate from 6%
to 9% can be disruptive of the RIDF operations. The RBI of course has permitted
NABARD to apply the same 6% plus 0.5 percentage point loan rate until March
2012. But, thereafter the loan rate has been kept at 1.5 percentage point below
