A K Bhattacharya: Highway to nowhere

RAISINA HILL

Unlike the NDA, the UPA does not have a focussed approach to infrastructure and that is why it has missed most of its targets.

In 1997, the United Front government had set up a committee to suggest ways to improve infrastructure in our country. That committee came out with many well-meaning recommendations to remove the biggest hurdle in India's ambitious march towards achieving higher economic growth. The United Front government could not do anything noteworthy to implement any of those recommendations.

The two Vajpayee-led governments that succeeded the UF government and ruled the country for about six years also swore by infrastructure and the need to improve it. In those six years, some action was initiated. The massive national highway development programme was launched. The airport modernisation plan was also announced along with the roads development programme. But not much progress was noticed on the airports front.

The roads development project, however, made substantial headway and, in fact, helped the economy in many ways. In addition, public-private partnership programmes to take up infrastructure projects were launched. Even a plan to meet the "viability" gap in the financing of infrastructure projects was put in place.

Almost three years ago, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government led by Manmohan Singh was formed and lost no time in announcing its intention to beef up the country's over-stressed infrastructure sector. In his earlier ministerial stint, Manmohan Singh had rued his complete reliance on the private sector for building infrastructure. Between 1991 and 1995, policies had been liberalised to permit private sector investment in infrastructure projects. But there was no progress. With the public sector's efforts constrained by delays and non-availability of funds, the late P V Narasimha Rao lost five years to initiate basic infrastructure work. A big opportunity was lost.

This time, soon after taking charge at the helm of the government, Manmohan Singh opted for the public-private partnership route to speed up infrastructure work. He even toyed with the proposal of using foreign exchange reserves to build infrastructure "" an idea that seemed unfeasible and unworkable to many and hence did not make any headway. But he lost no opportunity to articulate the country's massive needs for infrastructure investment. At every international and national forum, he outlined the urgency of infrastructure investment.

In all this excitement, however, his government seemed to have ignored the basic tasks at hand "" the need to build better national highways, improve rural roads connectivity, modernise airports and add capacity to generate, transmit and distribute more power. Not that there were no announcements or that financial provisions were not made in the annual budgets. What remained conspicuous by its absence was the mission-like approach to all the targets of capacity addition in these key infrastructure areas. The difference between the Vajpayee government's national highways programme and the execution of all infrastructure programmes under the UPA government was this: the mission approach evident in the Vajpayee government was not to be seen under the UPA regime.

Not surprisingly, therefore, one notices a marked failure in meeting targets of adding capacity to almost all the infrastructure areas that the UPA government swears by. The figures for the just-concluded 2006-07 financial year are now out. And the story is more or less the same everywhere. Against the target of constructing over 35,000 kilometres of rural roads in 2006-07, what was actually built was a little more than 16,000 kilometres. In the Tenth Plan, the power sector was to have added 41,000 mw of generation capacity. What actually got added was about half that figure! The peak time and average power shortages have shot up.

New programmes for road development were announced a couple of years ago, but there are no signs of any follow-up work on them. Projects to modernise airports in Delhi and Mumbai have just begun and will take a couple more years before one can benefit from such an upgrade. Even the preliminary work on setting up six new healthcare research and hospital facilities like the All India Institute of Medical Sciences has not begun, even though an announcement to set them up was made three years ago.

The list of instances where the government has failed to expedite infrastructure projects can be longer. The government's much-talked about outcome budgets for different ministries would have captured much of this failure. That, however, is not enough. There is need to analyse what went wrong with the infrastructure programmes and take quick remedial measures. For ten long years have different governments at the Centre huffed and puffed about the need to improve infrastructure. It is time to move on to the fast lane.