National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) is strengthening the organisation by appointing 13 more chief general managers (CGMs).
“To achieve the targets set by us, we need more people at the senior level. We have decided to appoint 13 CGMs, who are the seniormost after the board members,” said a senior NHAI official, who did not want to be identified.
Currently, NHAI has 11 CGMs and the appointment of 13 new ones will be announced soon by a selection committee headed by road secretary R S Gujaral.
Of the 13 new CGMs, nine will look after technical operations and one each will be for safety, contract management, legal and planning and quality.
After Union road transport minister Kamal Nath set a target of 20 km a day, he had asked NHAI to decentralise operations, increase its staff and also increase the number of officials under its own cadre.
NHAI, which then had over 85 per cent of its 400 staffers on deputation from various organisations, absorbed around 200 of them into its own cadre.
It is also set get a new chairman soon. The present incumbent, Brajeshwar Singh, is on a three-month extension.
The road transport ministry had also decentralised its operations by opening 10 offices across the country, to monitor road building.
Taking forward its decentralisationa plan, NHAI had created six zonal offices, each headed by an executive director. The zonal offices are in Mumbai, Bangalore, Guwahati, Lucknow, Bhopal and Kolkata. It had earlier opened regional offices, headed by CGMs, in Lucknow, Patna, Jammu, Chennai, Guwahati, Delhi, Nagpur, Bangalore and Kolkata. Earlier, these offices used to report to the head office; they now report to the zonal offices.
It had also opened 150 special land acquisition offices in various states, headed by an Additional District Magistrate or Sub-Divisional Magistrate, to liaise with NHAI through the latter’s project directors. Ten of these units are in Rajasthan, 13 in Bihar, 25 in UP, seven in Gujarat, 11 in Orissa, 13 in West Bengal, four in Jharkhand, 11 in Maharashtra, five in Assam and so on.
