year 2015–16, the GSDP growth rates of Andhra Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh was higher than Maharashtra, Odisha or Punjab. Since the early 1950s, successive governments have implemented various schemes, under planning, to alleviate poverty, that have met with partial success. Programmes like Food for work and National Rural Employment Programme have attempted to use the unemployed to generate productive assets and build rural infrastructure. In August 2005, the Indian parliament passed the Rural Employment Guarantee Bill, the largest programme of this type, in terms of cost and coverage, which promises 100 days of minimum wage employment to every rural household in 200 of India's 600 districts. The Indian government is planning to bring in more economic reforms which can help farmers and unskilled labourers transition into industrialised sectors. Physical infrastructure Since independence, India has allocated nearly half of the total outlay of the five-year plans for infrastructural development. Much of the total outlay was spent on large projects in the area of irrigation, energy, transport, communications and social overheads. Development of infrastructure was completely in the hands of the public sector and was plagued by corruption, bureaucratic inefficiencies, urban-bias and an inability to scale investment. Kolkata was the first city in India to boast of a metro-system. The government has partially opened up infrastructure to the private sector allowing foreign investment. India holds second position in the world in roadways' construction. As of 2018, there were an estimated 18,170,000 broadband lines in India. The country boasts the second highest number of internet users at 446.75 million which translates to around 35% of the country's population. A 2007 study by the Asian Development Bank showed that in 20 cities the average duration of water supply was only 4.3 hours per day. No city had a continuous water supply. The longest duration of supply was 12 hours per day in Chandigarh, and the lowest was 0.3 hours per day in Rajkot. A study by WaterAid estimated as many as 157 million Indians live without adequate sanitation. India comes top for having the greatest number of urbanites living without sanitation. Regional imbalance One of the critical problems facing India's economy is the sharp and growing regional variations among India's different states and territories in terms of per capita income, poverty, availability of infrastructure and socio-economic development. For instance, the difference in growth rate between the forward and backward states was 0.3% (5.2%