According to the targeted length of 21.89 lakh kilometers of rural road length for 5.92 lakh villages in the 1981-2000 Road Development Plan of India (Lucknow Plan), the average length of road per village comes to about 3.70 kilometres. As per the grid analysis approach the road length for each village is 4.74 kilometres in the same road plan document. By now a considerable length of road has been constructed since the preparation of the Lucknow Plan. Many of the smaller villages would have some roads constructed in their vicinity. It will, therefore, be proper to assume a required length of 4.0 kilometres per village. With this assumption the total rural road length required would be 11,62,000 kilometres.

These roads will require culverts and minor bridges to make them negotiable even in rainy season. On an average one can assume about two culverts per kilometer of road length and one minor bridge per village for estimation purposes.

At the rate of Rs. 8 lakhs per km including C.D. Works (2 per km), the construction cost for the road length mentioned above comes to about Rs. 93,000 crores. Assuming one minor bridge for every village the total

no. of minor bridges would be 2,90,480 and at the rate of Rs. 6 lakh per minor bridge, the total cost of minor bridges will be about Rs. 18,000 crores. Thus, the grand total for connecting all the unconnected villages with all weather black topped roads will be Rs. 1,11,000 crores. The cost of major bridges will be extra.

The above figure does not include the cost of black topping for those all-weather village approach roads, which today have some thickness of metal crust and C.D. works. Some minor bridges on these roads would still be missing. Even as per rough figures available for Maharashtra State only about 20,000 villages out of a total of 32,369 villages, i.e. 62% having all-weather connectivity have a black topped approach road. While some State like Haryana, Punjab are much advanced than Maharashtra in this matter, there are several States which are behind. Taking Maharashtra figures as a guide it can be assumed that 50% of the 2.89 lakh villages connected by all weather roads have a black topped roads of approx. 1,45,000 villages having all-weather approaches will have to be black topped and some minor bridges will have to be constructed on them. Assuming that one minor bridge may be needed per 5 villages in this category. 23,000 minor bridges will be required. At the rate of 6 lakhs per minor bridge the cost of minor bridges would be Rs. 1,680 crores. Assuming that black topping of an existing WBM road including strengthening costs about Rs. 5 lakhs per