New Delhi, May 16: A week before it celebrates its first birthday, the UPA government presented its first big gift to rural India: Rs 1,74,000 crore for a project called Bharat Nirman. “Bharat” will not encompass India but only rural India.

The outlay for the project was approved at a meeting of the committee on rural infrastructure, which was chaired by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Representatives of the finance, rural development, power, panchayati raj, surface transport, communications and water resources ministries as well as the deputy chairman and members of the Planning Commission attended the meeting.

The Bharat Nirman project was announced by finance minister P. Chidambaram in his budget speech as a “four-year business plan for building infrastructure, especially in rural India”.

A press release issued by the Prime Minister’s Office made it clear that the project would be a time-bound one for four years and the investments would be in six critical areas of rural infrastructure.

Its objectives are to bring an additional one crore hectares under assured irrigation, connect all villages with a population of 1,000 or 500 in hill and tribal areas with a road, construct 60 lakh houses for the poor, provide drinking water to over 74,000 new habitations, widen the electricity network to 1,25,000 villages that still do not have power and offer electricity connections to 2.3 crore households and provide phone connectivity to 66,822 villages.

According to the PMO release, Singh described Bharat Nirman as the “most important initiative of the UPA government this year, offering a new deal to rural India”.

He reportedly stressed that it would “emphasise outcomes and not just outlays”.

The Prime Minister called on the implementing ministries and state governments to improve the government’s “absorptive capacity so that the system does not become a constraint on our ability to deliver”.

Singh made the point that Bharat Nirman should be implemented with a “sense of urgency and dedication at all levels of government”.

Today’s meeting included a power-point presentation on the four-year agenda for implementing the projects under Bharat Nirman.