New Delhi, May 23:

India’s prime minister promised today to spend nearly $11 billion to improve rural roads as he slammed corruption in the construction sector.

The government has prepared a two-year plan ‘to provide all-weather rural road connectivity to 66,000 villages’ of India’s 640,000 villages at a cost of Rs 480 billion Indian Currency (IC) ($10.7 billion),” prime minister Manmohan Singh said. But he said vigilance was needed to make sure the money was well spent in the South Asian nation, long notorious for corruption.

“Corruption in road construction projects has spread like cancer to every corner of our vast country,” Singh said. India needed “quality benchmarks and quality assurance for rural roads,” Singh said, blaming shoddy construction on corruption and “the lack of quality assurance.”

Good infrastructure was key to attracting investment to rural India that would reduce the gap between rich and poor, Singh added.

“Without connectivity, our rural economy will not be able to develop,” said Singh, whose government was voted into power three years ago on a pro-poor ticket.

Improved connectivity “promotes access to economic and social services” and “facilitates the growth processes in our rural economy,” Singh said.

‘Return tax’

NEW DELHI: Indian finance minister P Chidambaram on Wednesday urged people to file their tax returns on time, saying the tax return forms in India were the ‘simplest’ in the world. “IT (income tax) laws in India can be simplified but our tax return forms are among the simplest in the world,” the minister said. — HNS