Cseke Attila: 'Anghel Saligny' programme to focus on water, sewage, natural gas connections, road infrastructure

Minister of Development, Public Works and Administration Cseke Attila declared on Wednesday that the national investment programme "Anghel Saligny" will focus only on the connection to the water and sewage system, to natural gas and to the improvement road infrastructure. "One of the draft emergency ordinances that we have made public today is the one for the approval of the national investment programme 'Anghel Saligny'. It aims to come up with a concerted approach on three major areas of investment, on three areas to which the Romanian population has the right to have access: we are talking about access to water and sewage systems, we are talking about the connection to the natural gas system and about the improvement of the road infrastructure, namely roads of local and county interest. I would like to give you some official figures of the National Institute of Statistics, justifying the need for this ambitious investment programme, which will be carried out strictly in these fields. As regards the water and sewage system, today, in Romania, 29 percent of the administrative-territorial units do not have access to the water network, which means that 71 percent do have, so, 2,271 ATUs out of 3,181, without taking into account the county councils and the sectors of the Bucharest municipality," Cseke Attila told a news conference. The Minister added that 57 percent of the administrative-territorial units do not have their own sewerage network. "As regards the connection of the population to the natural gas network, 70 percent of the ATUs do not have natural gas networks, while 30 percent do have, in number of 955. With regard to the road system, as many as 20,000 kilometers of county roads are not modernized in Romania, accounting for 57 percent of the county road network, more than 27,000 kilometers of communal roads, representing 80 percent of the total, are not upgraded to today's standards. In the next period, the Ministry of Development proposes this investment programme to meet these important needs of local communities to develop along these three important levels," said the minister. AGERPRES (RO - author: Dana Piciu, editor: Florin Marin; EN - author: Simona Iacob, editor: Cristina Zaharia)