After PM review, road ministry raises highways target

The surface transport ministry has set a higher target for highway tender awards this fiscal barely a week after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asked it to step up the pace.

The ministry has identified an additional 20 national highway projects that will connect 2,071 km, over and above the 7,300 km it was planning to achieve, this fiscal. The additional projects will require investments worth Rs16,000 crore.

With this, the total investment in the national highways sector in 2011-12 will be around Rs73,000 crore.

The ministry has also been directed to prepare a shelf of projects of around 10,000 km, and another 15,000 km to be taken up for preparation of detailed project reports.

In upping the award targets, the ministry has in a way defied the Planning Commission. A senior National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) official said the authority is essentially reverting back to its original plan of awarding 9,000 km this fiscal —- a target that was later pruned by the Planning Commission.

More than half of the 20 newly identified projects belong to phase four of the National Highways Development Programme (NHDP). Projects in this phase essentially provide interconnectivity among national highways and state highways.

Meanwhile, the ministry is girding up for the task. Surface transport minister C P Joshi is likely to call a stakeholders’ meeting soon, said sources in the know.

Going by the past records though, the new target to award highway projects spanning 9,300 km appears to be an ambitious one for the government.

The ministry awarded 44 national highways projects on public-private partnership basis last fiscal, spanning a total of 4,425 km and requiring an investment of around Rs40,000 crore.

In 2009-10, it had logged a total of 3,360 km, awarding upgrade contracts worth Rs33,300 crore.