NHAI gets more road projects

The government's plans to execute the Rs 48,000 crore new highway upgradation projects on its own has come a cropper, with the ministry of road transport and highways transferring the responsibility of executing these projects to the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI).

According to officials, NHAI is targeting the award of six of these highway sections to bidders before the end of this month. Following the announcement of these projects by Finance Minister Jaswant Singh in Budget 2003-04, the government had decided to create a three-tier organisational structure within the ministry of road transport and highways for the implementation of the projects, involving upgradation of about 10,000 km of highways, exclusive of the ongoing Rs 58,000 crore National Highways Development Project (NHDP).

It was decided that the government's specialised highway building body ""NHAI "" would be kept out of the execution of these 48 high-density BOT sections, since the Authority was saddled with the responsibility of NHDP.

"With the ministry finding it difficult to handle these projects on its own, the responsibility of executing is again with NHAI," an official said. At present, a skeletal team in NHAI was working on these projects, officials said.

The government's financial involvement in these projects, being executed entirely on the build-operate-transfer (BOT) model, will be restricted to providing the capital grant component for filling in the gap between the operator's estimated toll revenue and the capital costs.

Bidding will take place on the extent of capital grant sought by the operator, which has been estimated at 25-30 per cent of the project cost, according to officials.

Of the 48 projects, the Centre had taken up seven high-density road corridors totaling 622 km for bidding this fiscal, of which six sections would be awarded before March 31, an official said. The sections include corridors in Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh.

The ministry had, in August last year, shortlisted 98 entrepreneurs, including 20 foreign firms, for the upgradation of these non-NHDP corridors.

The ministry had also finalised the consultants, who would be preparing the detailed project reports for these seven BOT sections, having a traffic density between 9,000 and 30,000 passenger car units (PCUs).