eMARG is an e-Governance solution for:

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — A, Maintenance of rural roads. eMARG stands for 'electronic Maintenance of Rural Roads under PMGSY'. It is an enterprise e-Governance application built by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) for the National Rural Infrastructure Development Agency (NRIDA) under the Ministry of Rural Development, and it manages and monitors the maintenance of roads constructed under the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana — covering the five-year post-construction Defect Liability Period and the five-year Performance Guarantee period, so that maintenance work and contractor payments are tracked in a single transparent system.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) State highways are built and maintained by the State PWDs, not by NRIDA. eMARG's scope is fixed by its own name — rural roads built under PMGSY — and it does not extend to the State highway network.  (c) National highways fall under the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways and NHAI, an entirely different ministry with its own monitoring systems. eMARG belongs to the rural development side of government.  (d) Wrong, because option (a) is precisely right — eMARG is officially described as an e-Governance solution for the maintenance of rural roads constructed under PMGSY.

Concept: PMGSY (Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana), launched on 25 December 2000, is a Ministry of Rural Development programme to give all-weather road connectivity to unconnected habitations, implemented through NRIDA. Building the road is only half the job; keeping it usable is the other half, and that is where eMARG comes in — it digitises maintenance contracts, inspections and payments for PMGSY roads. It sits in a family of PMGSY IT systems: OMMAS for online management, monitoring and accounting of projects and funds, the Meri Sadak app for citizen complaints about road quality, and GIS-based systems for rural road planning.

State PCS 2026 Q34 — Science & Technology PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2026 Q34 — Science & Technology PYQ with Answer