Posted on Wednesday, March 24, 2010 - 04:12 pm:

---

quote:

Nine months back on July 29, Minister for Road Transport and Highways Kamal Nath had unveiled a grand plan for the ailing highway sector — constructing 20 kilometres of highways every day. Replying to a discussion on the working of his Ministry, Nath boasted in Rajya Sabha that his Ministry would build more roads in one year than the BJP-led NDA Government had done in its six years at the Centre.

As the financial year comes to a close in a week, Nath's promises remain woefully unfulfilled. The latest statistics furnished by his own Ministry and NHAI reveal that Nath has not even been able to reach the halfway mark of his ambitious projections.

A look at statistics of the last six months shows that despite the claims of improving processes within NHAI, there is a massive shortfall in meeting the target. In October 2009, the daily progress was as poor as 4.84 kilometres per day (150 km in the entire month), 6.8 km in November, 8.87 km in December, which fell to 8.26 km in January. The data for February offered a glimmer of hope as NHAI constructed 381 km in the month. According to the Ministry's own admission, 20 km would take a long time.

Claiming that in this financial year, Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) and NHAI would award contracts for building highway length of 15,000 km, Nath had said, "I am very happy to say that this year we would be awarding 15,000 km of roads with a value of one lakh crore of rupees. Now this is triple the length that was awarded when this project was started. I am not making this NDA vs UPA issue but I am trying to give it in terms of quantum jump we are doing."

According to statistics provided by MoRTH, contracts for only 3,166 km of highway length have been awarded — which works out about 21 per cent of the target set by the Minister. In fact, the MoRTH under the NDA had fared far better in 2001-02 fiscal when it awarded contracts for a highway length of 3,476 km. Overall, the BJP-led NDA Government had awarded contracts for highway length of 5,384 km from 2000-01 till 2003-04.

So far, NHAI has not even been able to complete Golden Quadrilateral — the first project conceived under National Highway Development Programme (NHDP). Land acquisition for Golden Quadrilateral, which had an original deadline of 2003, has still not been done. In fact, the physical progress of incomplete GQ corridors — Mumbai-Chennai, Kolkata-Chennai and Delhi-Kolkata — has remained the same since October 1. Land acquisition has also remained static on all these corridors.

---