PMGSY Chintan Shivir: 62 Thousand km Roads in Fourth Phase

Union Minister of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare and of Rural Development Shivraj Singh Chouhan addressed the two-day National Chintan Shivir on the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY) at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi on 5 October 2026. He told officers and engineers not to let the camp become a formality, and asked them for firm and inventive answers to the difficulties that show up on the ground. The next phase of the scheme, he said, must be about quality connectivity rather than ordinary construction. Minister of State for Rural Development Kamlesh Paswan, Rural Development Secretary Rohit Kansal and the secretaries, chief engineers and specialists of every state and union territory attended.

What has been built and what comes next

The Minister said that about 8.50 lakh kilometres of rural roads have been laid in the country so far. The fourth phase of the scheme carries a target of 62 thousand kilometres of new roads, of which 20 thousand kilometres have already been sanctioned, and the rest is to be completed to a timetable.

Timelines and tendering

A limit of 72 days has been fixed between sanction and the start of construction, but some states are breaching it, and the Minister said a full account would be prepared for them. Repeated cancellation of tenders and the absence of bids should be settled in advance through pre-tender planning, since delay pushes up the cost of construction material. On forest and environment clearances he said that writing letters and waiting is no solution, and that officers should sit with the environment department and district collectors to clear pending cases in one go.

Quality and climate-resilient design

• Agencies that build badly are to be blacklisted at once, with a watch kept so that the same contractor does not return through a new company in another name
• One engineering model cannot be applied to every state and every kind of terrain
• Detailed project reports must account for local gradient, drainage, culverts and waterlogging
• Maintenance for five years after construction is the responsibility of the agency concerned, so thinking must shift to life cycle management
• A standing financial arrangement should be created for maintenance after the guarantee period, on the lines of the mandi fund used in Madhya Pradesh

States that were praised

For quality of work the Minister named Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan. For maintenance he named Punjab, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. Uttar Pradesh was commended for its use of Full Depth Reclamation technology and Assam for QR coding of assets. States that finish on time and to standard will be given weightage in future sanctions, and a special felicitation ceremony is to be held for them.

Focus on difficult areas

The Minister directed that roads under PM-JANMAN be built on a war footing in the remote and Naxal-affected areas of Chhattisgarh, Gadchiroli in Maharashtra, Jharkhand and Andhra Pradesh. He summed up the thinking behind the scheme as a progression from construction to connectivity, from connectivity to continuity and from continuity to community, and asked participants for original and workable suggestions that the government is ready to take into policy.