The government may be planning to increase infrastructure spending in a big way, and is looking at ways to augment funding, but going by the current state of affairs, it can hardly complete even the projects it has on hand. The most successful infrastructure project run by the government, most will admit, is the national highways one. After the fast progress under the NDA government which conceived the project to convert/strengthen existing national highways to four-laned ones, progress on National Highway Development Programme-I fell to 49 per cent in 2007-08, it was 51 per cent for NHDP-II (in terms of the fresh contracts that were awarded, it was just 5 per cent), 9 per cent for awarding contracts/concessions for NHDP-III and 29 per cent for awarding concessions in NHDP-V. Of the total of 9,329 km of four-laning done, just a little over 60 per cent has toll collection facilities.
As for the funding, the World Bank has about $2bn worth of projects on hand (roughly 1,500km in the Delhi-Kolkata and Lucknow-Muzaffarpur legs) at the moment, and may well pull the plug on the $620mn loan it signed for the Lucknow-Muzaffarpur National Highway four years ago. The reason is simple: of the sections of the highway that were to have been completed by around now, under a fifth of the work has been completed — at the current pace, it could take another decade to complete. Around $255 mn of the loan is for stretches in Bihar.
Before the Bank decided to formally complain to Road Transport Minister TR Baalu, it decided to do a detailed study on six of around 30 projects that it is involved in — these six involved 11 different design consultants, nine different contractors and 12 different supervision consultants, so it’s a pretty good cross-section the Bank got. The report’s findings are frightening. The way the highways project was structured, with an independent design consultant, then another independent consultant supervising the work done by contractors and the costs involved, the impression given is of a world-class highway system being built.
| WHAT'S BUGGING THE BANK (Status of work in five stretches it is financing on Lucknow-Muzaffarpur Highway Project, Oct 31) | |||
| Highway | Length (km) | Physical Progress (% of original contract value) | Original Completion Date |
| Duhwa Mishir-Barsha Zaffar | 44 | 16.2 | 17-Oct-08 |
| UP/Bihar Border-Dewapur | 41 | 15.1 | 27-Oct-08 |
| Dewapur-Kotwa | 38 | 16.1 | 10-Nov-08 |
| Kotwa-Mehsi | 40 | 18.3 | 10-Nov-08 |
| Mehsi-Muzzaffarpur | 40 | 17.7 | 30-Oct-08 |
| In 2007-08, progress on NHDP-I was 49%; it was 5% for awarding contracts on NHDP-II, 9% for awarding contracts on NHDP-III and 29% for awarding concessions in NHDP-V | |||
Read the report, and the picture you get is quite different. It is of consultants doing precious little, of them colluding with the contractors when it comes to the testing of the materials being used and the quality of the highway, of inspectors simply not visiting work sites. Some sample comments from the study:
* Design consultants don’t do their work properly as a result of which, as the project goes along, the design has to be changed — in one case, 90 per cent of the road’s alignment had to be changed and this adds hugely to costs. Traffic projections are routinely wrong. In one case, seven underpasses, one rail overbridge and new spans were added to bridges afterwards — this applies to most projects. Even measurements are incorrect (vertical alignment errors of up to 10 feet have been reported!) and design drawings don’t match actual ground conditions. This raises costs and increases delays.
* Structures are overbuilt which helps contractors earn more. (The Delhi-Gurgaon expressway is a case study in this context — near the Radisson hotel, for instance, an underpass would have done the trick but instead the entire expressway was elevated. There are several other such examples — of major design changes late into the contract, https://www.business-standard.com/india/news/sunil-jain-wait-forfinal-gurgaon-bill/07/47/313294/.)
* Very poor road safety — during the construction of 221 km on NH2, there was more than one death per km per year.
* Big variations in the specifications — the Bank has been asking for the detailed contracts for around nine months but is yet to get them!
* Laboratory tests are carried out jointly by the contractor and the resident engineer’s staff; in one case, the engineer rarely visited the site.
In other words, the story is one of the National Highways Authority of India beginning its decline to just another public works department of any state government in the country. What a decline for a showcase project that not just helped the country build up vital infrastructure, but showed how even a government department (NHAI) could transform itself and function just as well as any modern private-sector firm.
