Govt boosts infrastructure development with record budget allocations: Jyotiraditya Scindia

Communications Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia has said that the government has taken several steps for infrastructure development in the country in the last ten years. Briefing media in New Delhi on Friday, the Minister said, record budget allocations were made to improve the infrastructure resulting in massive coverage of road, railways and aviation infrastructure in the north-eastern states.

The Minister underscored the National Infrastructure Pipeline with a budget of one hundred eleven trillion rupees that aims to facilitate world-class infrastructure in the country. He said, this year two lakh seventy thousand crore rupees have been allocated for the Road sector which was 31 thousand crore rupees in 2013-14. Mr Scindia informed that the National Highways network has witnessed 60 per cent growth during the last ten years reaching over one lakh 46 kilometres. He pointed out that 37.8 kilometres of roads are being made in the



country per day.

Further, in the railways sector, the Minister underlined that a record budget of more than 2 lakh 62 thousand crore rupees has been allocated by the government in this fiscal year which is eight times more than the budgetary allocations made by the previous UPA government. He stated that the government aims to run 4500 Vande Bharat trains by 2047. Mr Scindia also asserted that 14.54 kilometres of railway tracks were laid per day in the last year.

He added that more than thirty-one thousand kilometres of railway tracks were laid in the ten years. Highlighting the initiatives in the Aviation Sector, the Communications Minister said that in the last ten years, the construction of airports doubled from 74 to 157 and the fleet size increased from 400 to 723. He added that the penetration of airports in the Northeastern region has doubled to 17.