Road Ministry fixes 5,000 km for FY’14

NEW DELHI: The bleak performance of the last fiscal has led the Road Transport and Highways Ministry to scale down its projects award target by almost half to 5,000 kilometers for this fiscal as compared to the ambitious target of 9,500 kilometers which was set during the fiscal of 2012-13.

Road Transport and Highways Ministry officials have confirmed that a target of awarding road construction projects for 5,000 kilometers of highways has been fixed by the Ministry for the present fiscal, as the Ministry was barely capable of awarding 15 per cent of the targeted 9,500 kilometers of highways last fiscal.

The officials further confirm that owing to a number of factors including equity crunch and delay in clearances the response received by bidders in the last fiscal was lukewarm, due to this the Ministry was in the favour of affixing a target of 4,028 kilometers for the current fiscal but later it increased it to 5,000 kilometers on the instance from the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO).

Another concern of the PMO was that post awarding of the projects, chiefly on the public-private-partnership (PPP) mode, the responsibility was transferred on the developers by the Ministry pertaining to which the PMO has instructed the ministry to ensure adequate and appropriate monitoring as well as implementation of the projects.

When it comes down to the target for awarding of roads on OMT (operate, maintain and transfer) mode, the Road Ministry fixed it at just 1,295 kilometers. During the last fiscal, the Ministry could only award 1,812 kilometers as compared to an exceedingly ambitious target of 19,387 kilometers.

Furthermore a target of 3,000 kilometers has been fixed for the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) to be completed contracts within the current fiscal. NHAI had previously completed 2,845 kilometers within 2012-13 against the target of 3,000 kilometers. The Ministry has set 3,595 kilometers as the target for collecting toll revenue by the NHAI.