Golden Quadrilateral delayed by a year on Orissa blip

The ambitious Golden Quadrilateral (GQ) project, earlier scheduled for completion this June, will take at least a year more.

“It will take yet another year for the GQ to be completed. We had some structural as well as contractual issues in an Orissa project on the corridor, which caused the delay,” an official of the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) said on the condition of anonymity.

The small stretch in Orissa, stuck because of contractual and structural issues, is likely to be completed only next year.

The decade-old project envisages 5,846 km connectivity on the Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata trunk routes.

Meanwhile, the Planning Commission and the transport ministry have locked horns yet again, this time on six-laning of the GQ.

The GQ, approved in 2000 by the then National Democratic Alliance government, is a four-lane corridor and figures in Phase I of the National Highways Development Programme (NHDP).

According to the NHAI, the 1,419 km stretch between Delhi and Mumbai and 1,290 km between Mumbai and Chennai have been fully completed. The Delhi-Kolkata stretch spanning 1,453 km is 99.9% complete with less than a kilometre remaining.

Work on Kolkata Chennai corridor (1,684 km) is continuing on the remaining 25 km stretch.

The NHAI official, however, said the authority would stick to the timeline in the case of Phase II of NHDP, better known as North South East West connectivity corridor, spanning 7,300 km.

The authority hopes to complete the East-West corridor by 2013 and the North-South one by 2015. Of the total length, 5,560 km is completed and 1,161 km is under implementation.

Experts remain bullish on the prospects of the corridor and say delays are natural given the enormity of the project.

Parvesh Minocha, MD, transportation division, Feedback Ventures, said that out of the 200-odd concessions, only five or so had some issues and it’s natural given the land acquisition bottleneck. “So we shouldn’t be unduly harsh on them (NHAI). It should be completed in a year or so.”

On concern that the GQ highways could be impacted by state roads, some of which are tolled, running parallel or adjacent to them, Minocha said, “Traffic won’t be affected a lot.”

He said it made sense to have two roads near each other as long as the start and end points were not the same for both and the difference in length exceeded 10%.

Meanwhile, differences seem to be simmering yet again between the Planning Commission and the road transport ministry. According to sources, the Planning Commission has pitched for six-laning of the entire GQ, while the NHAI feels upgradation should be commensurate with upside in traffic.

“In certain pockets, where traffic is growing, we would certainly take up six-laning. But upgrading the entire stretch is a wastage of national reserves,” an official said.