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Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government has begun a splurge on road and rail building that could remove doubts over whether economic growth in India is really overtaking China.

"They have acknowledged that infrastructure is the big elephant in the room," said Vinayak Chatterjee, head of infrastructure services company Feedback Infra. "Once these measures are implemented, the elephant would start dancing, and with it the overall economy," he added.

The economy is growing at 7.5 percent in the quarter ending in March, easily outpacing China. Many economists doubt, the government statisticians’ new way of counting GDP, stating that it overstates how well India is doing. The government has prioritized by unblocking infrastructure projects that had been gathering dust, because of either an obstructive bureaucracy, a lack of private sector investment or in some cases public interest litigation.

“We don’t have enough money to build all these roads,” Rohit Kumar Singh, a mid-level bureaucrat at the ministry, told, “We need to leverage private sector funding.”

“You have to create an environment where investors and lenders can make a return,” Virendra Mhaiskar, managing director of IRB Infrastructure Developers Ltd, one of India’s largest road builders said.

The government hopes that road building will accelerate to 30 km a day by the end of next year from 12 km a day at present, as it plans to award projects for 10,000 km of road in this year, up 25 percent a year earlier.

By Premji