A rare sight in Kolkata on Monday evening and Tuesday a Union minister and a Bengal chief minister at the same table without a point scored at each other, at least for the time being in camera. Estate minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, who also serves as the minister for agriculture and rural development, arrived for a two-day review meeting which culminated in the awarding of about Rs 1,000 crore for constructing roads in villages, and the release of sanctions for nearly a lakh houses under the rural housing scheme. In a state where agriculture still employs nearly two-thirds of the workforce, this is no footnote. It's the sort of cash that can mean a village can be isolated from the closest market town.

The numbers were not randomly generated. The package's broad terms had been struck with Chouhan and Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari in early June when the Centre issued an approval letter to the same Rs 1,000 crore allocation for roads and an extra rural employment scheme valued at more than Rs 700 crore, which was designed to continue paying wages after the current work cycle ended. All of this this week has changed, however, is that the arrangement has shifted from a set of letters and promises to a working roadmap, elaborated during a dinner meeting and subsequently reviewed in full with the chief secretary of the state and senior officials from both governments and technical teams of the ministries of rural development and agriculture. Chouhan was also able to visit the jute belt villages around Barrackpore and sit with the jute growers and women of the self-help groups discussing with them on the technique of retting, the scarcity of water and the price received by the growers for their jute, a reminder that road money and housing money have to reflect on to something the farmer can sell more.

Against a national backdrop, the share of the revenue from Bengal is reasonable and not extraordinary. The rural roads ministry has budgeted nearly Rs 19,000 crore for this financial year just for the construction of more than 26,000 kilometres of village roads across the country, with a particular emphasis on tribal and left-wing-extremism-hit areas which were previously considered out of the equation. The same package was completed in May for Madhya Pradesh, which has also received a package of Rs 4,000 crore, with a portion reserved for road development and the other for house construction. The politics and the timing of the Bengal allocation that is important, not the size. The transfer, which is the first significant rural infrastructure transfer to the state since the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) replaced a 15-year government of the Trinamool Congress in May, is one of the party's longest single-party rule in any large state of the country. Chouhan was not deceptive, saying that multiple schemes were not launched under the previous government and the funds that are being streamed were due instead of a favour.

This framing will not be challenged and it shouldn't be. Giving sanction letters is easy; disbursement and land acquisition and contractors on ground work is the difficult part; and Indian infrastructure delivery has a history of failing to meet its own schedule by years, not months and the PMGSY projects are no exception. The rural roads agency, Bengal, has previously pointed out that "a significant portion of the works sanctioned in the previous phases" are yet to be completed over 10 years later, while other states, both under government and opposition governments, have faced similar problems. A thousand crore rupees can be divided among a population of approximately seven crore in the rural areas of a state, as far as execution goes. There is a different arithmetic for the housing component. In the plains, the national scheme under the current criteria results in a little more than a lakh of rupees for a rural beneficiary, and combined with the wage support through the employment guarantee scheme, a bill of over one thousand crore rupees is dished out eventually, a proportion of which the Centre and state share, ninety-tens or sixty-forties, depending on the component.

The economic justification for the expenditures is not subject to debate. Rural roads are always one of the highest multiplier investments that governments can make; they reduce transport losses for perishables, bring construction material demand into local markets for cement, bricks and steel, and generate short-cycle wage employment which rural households can spend almost entirely locally. The multiplier effect of housing construction is similar in allied trades, such as masonry, carpentry, plumbing, trades that are more likely to rely on the informal labour force and are harder for state governments to formalise. Connectivity investments pay for themselves many times over in terms of market access and time saved, provided they live to see the day of their completion, the argument has gone for decades in Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

The real story on the ground in Bengal will be in the days to come more than the headline figure. State polls are still a long way ahead, but the time it takes to complete these roads and houses will be closely monitored by both governments as panchayat-level elections proceed. The paperwork has been relocated for now. The concrete has not Here's the rewritten piece, with title, body, the housing-progress chart.