A K Bhattacharya: A long and winding road

RAISINA HILL

The department of road transport and highways has made elaborate plans to expand the scope of what is now known as the National Highways Development Project (NHDP).

How big is the scope of the new plan? What is the investment required? Is the government's machinery geared to take on the additional responsibility of completing the project within a reasonable time frame?

First, the facts and the track record. The total length of India's national highways is 65,569 kilometres. To put this in perspective, this length is a little more than the total route kilometres of tracks laid by the Indian Railways since its inception more than 150 years ago.

In August 1998, the Vajpayee government announced an ambitious national highways development plan. This was soon christened NHDP and its first phase consisted of the Golden Quadrilateral project, which essentially meant improving road connectivity among the cities situated in four corners of the country.

The total road length, which was to be four-laned in the process, was 5,846 kilometres or less than 10 per cent of total length of the national highways.

Six years later, work on about 56 per cent of the Golden Quadrilateral project has been completed (by the end of October). Since many sections of the project are in advanced stages of completion, almost 73 per cent of the total work is expected to be over by the end of this month.

Will the entire project be completed by December 2005? The government's estimates show that 92 per cent of the work will be over by then. Which means that four-laning 5,846 kilometres of national highways will take close to eight years.

Such a modest pace of work has not deterred the government from planning more ambitious projects and setting even more unrealistic deadlines. The second phase of NHDP is to cover the 7,300 kilometres long North-South and East-West corridors. Work on 675 kilometres has been completed so far, while work is in progress on another 388 kilometres.

What about the rest? Contracts for work on about 6,000 kilometres will be awarded by June 2005. That means contracts worth Rs 34,000 crore. The final date for completing the second phase of NHDP is not clear.

In case one accuses the government of inadequate advance planning, the department of road transport and highways has initiated the process for getting the Public Investment Board's approval for the third phase of NHDP.

This phase will cover the four- and six-laning of about 10,000 kilometres of the existing national highways at a cost of Rs 55,000 crore. The project is yet to be cleared, but the deadline for completing it has been set at 2010. The relatively small first phase of NHDP will take about eight years. Now the government hopes to complete the third phase in less than six years.

There are plans beyond this. The department has assessed that once the three phases of NHDP are complete, 41,000 kilometres will still remain to be upgraded to two-lane national highways with proper pavements. So the next phase will be even larger. The details are still being worked out. But crucial questions remain unanswered.

One, should the department look at alternative and more effective ways of completing all these projects under NHDP? Two, where will the resources come from? Apart from the budgetary allocation every year, the government has only one major source of additional funding "" the Central Road Fund.

The amount of resources available from this kitty is about Rs 5,000 crore, but of this, less than Rs 2,000 crore go into the development of national highways, while the rest is for state highways, rural roads and railway bridge construction.

The government's objectives of advanced planning for better national highways are unexceptionable. But it is disconcerting to find that the department of road transport and highways has no answers as to how it hopes to meet the deadline for completing the projects and, more importantly, how to finance them.

The department probably cannot find a solution to these problems alone. The government has to step in and prepare an plan on additional resource mobilisation.

Whether the public-private partnership model can work for road projects or whether it should be left to the public sector National Highways Authority of India are issues that need to be resolved soon at the highest level of the government.

Without that, the department of road transport and highways will continue to announce grand plans for more road projects, but little action by way of implementing them will take place.