The National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) is set to meet its land acquisition target for this financial year.
NHAI has acquired 17,604 hectares — about 30 per cent of its target for the year — between April and July. However, its aim to construct roads at 20-km a day seems to be a distant dream.
The highway authority’s land acquisition target for 2010-11 was 60,564 hectares. In 2009-10 it had acquired 39,398 hectares. “NHAI is in the process of acquiring another 20,000 hectares of land in the second quarter (July-August period) of the current financial year and will be able to meet the targetted figure,” said an official in the road transport ministry.
Tamil Nadu leads the list in the land acquision drive with 1,989 hectares, followed by Maharashtra with 1,665 hectares. The third and fourth place goes to Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh with 1,479 and 1,390 hectares, respectively.
According to the model concession agreement, work on any road project can start only after 80 per cent of the total land required for the project is acquired. Delay in land acquisition still hampers around 70 per cent of the project.
Road builders are of the view that land acquisition should be done systematically and the success should not be in terms of the area acquired. “There have been instances where a major portion of land was acquired but patches were left in between. This delayed the entire project,” said M Murali, director general, National Highway Builders Federation.
For example, even if acquisition of 80-90 per cent of land for a 100-km road project is complete, but a stretch of 10 to 20 km somewhere in between remains to be acquired, construction cannot start, said Murli.
To expedite land acquisition, NHAI had opened 150 special land acquisition cells in several states, headed by an additional district magistrate (ADM) or sub-divisional magistrate (SDM), to liaise with NHAI through project directors (NHAI appointed them to look after the development of the project). It had also cut the time taken for the land acquisition process to 11 months from 24 months.
The NHAI had set up 10 special cells in Rajasthan, 13 in Bihar, 25 in Uttar Pradesh, seven in Gujarat, 11 in Orissa, 13 in West Bengal, four in Jharkhand, 11 in Maharashtra and five in Assam and around 40 in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Goa.
To further expedite road development, the highway authority decentralised its functioning with six zonal offices, each headed by an executive director (ED). While the Mumbai zonal office looks after Maharashtra, Goa and Gujarat, Bangalore controls the four southern states – Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala – and the Guwahati office monitored development in the north-eastern states.
The authority had earlier opened regional offices, headed by chief general managers in Lucknow, Patna, Jammu, Chennai, Guwahati, Delhi, Nagpur, Bangalore and Kolkata. These units now report to the zonal offices.
