Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma on Wednesday said his government will construct all-weather roads in 800 tea gardens across the state at an expenditure of Rs 800 crore.
Addressing a press conference, Sarma said the state cabinet, during its meeting earlier in the day, approved the proposal to improve connectivity in the tea gardens.
“To ensure all-weather connectivity in tea gardens, the cabinet has accorded approval to construct line roads in 800 gardens,” he said.
Each road will be built at a cost of Rs 1 crore and a total of Rs 800 crore has been approved, Sarma said.
Besides, the cabinet green-lighted a proposal to allocate Rs 8 crore to each school to upgrade the infrastructure of 126 state-run educational institutes, entailing a total expenditure of over Rs 1,000 crore.
“We have set a target to upgrade the building infrastructure of 500 government high schools during my tenure. Already, work for 126 schools was going on and with today’s decision, infrastructure in 252 schools is being upgraded,” Sarma said.
The government is considering upgrading the infrastructure of an additional 1,000 Assamese medium high schools during its next tenure after the 2026 assembly polls, he added.
The CM also said the cabinet approved the guidelines for the installation and maintenance of the Real-Time Data Acquisition System (RTDAS), 2024 to facilitate collection of hydrological data for effective water resource planning and flood forecasting in critical river basins of the state.
“A 10-year tentative roadmap for installation of nearly 800 RTDAS units for data collection across the state of Assam has been approved,” he added.
Talking about a different initiative of the government, Sarma said state-run coaching institutes for poor and middle-class students are being opened in several towns for National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET).
“Currently two centres are operating in Dibrugarh and Tezpur. In this year, three more will be opened in Nalbari, Silchar and Jorhat, followed by Pathsala and Bongaigaon. We plan to open one such centre in every district,” he added.
