The Modi-Government may be talking of boosting the daily road construction average to 30 kilometres per day, but in reality road development is moving at a snail’s pace. There has been a drop of 1.1 kilometre of daily road construction since the previous year in the same month. Figures with the Centre show that the execution of National Highway Development Project has declined to 3.2 km per day between April and October 2014 compared to 4.3 km per day during the same period in 2013.
The Ministry aims to construct 6,500 kilometres of roadways under National Highway Development Project in 2014-15. “The situation has been improving since last year, as months of July and August were particularly rough for the sector. The daily average of road building in the those months did not exceed more than two km a day bringing down the total average pace during the seven months,” said an official from the Ministry of Road, Transport and Highways.
“Funding constraints and financial stress have impeded the pace of development in the road sector. Other issues like land acquisition, environmental and forest clearances and shifting of utilities has delayed projects, but we are trying to overcome the hurdles,” he said. Several projects in the NHDP phase-V — the Vijaywada-Gundugolanu section (Andhra Pradesh), six-laning of Aurangabad-Barwa Adda (Bihar-Jharkhand), six-laning of Gundugolani-Rajamundry (AP), Vadodara-Surat Section, six-laning of Anandapuram-Visakapatnam-Anakapalli (AP), six-laning of Kishangarh - Udaipur-Ahmedabad (Rajasthan-Gujarat), Agra-Etawah (UP), Etawah-Chakeri (UP), Delhi-Agra (Delhi-UP) have not even started, even years after being commissioned.
Officials say that Public-Private Partnership projects which were doled out on Build-Operate-Transfer-Toll mode in 2007-2011 are facing 20-months delays causing the project cost escalation to go up over three folds in the delayed time. “Currently, PPP-toll projects are unable to attract any bidders due to stressed balance sheet of the developers, resulting in unavailability of financing from banks and stuck equity of the developers in the current projects,” said the official.
“We are now bidding out projects under the Equipment Procurement Construction mode, where the financial risk burden is on the Government. We are seeing a lot of positive response from developers and once the construction starts, we will see a bold improvement,” said the official. As of last year, 22 PPP projects saw no bidders from the private sector, which forced the Government to shift to Gover-nment-funded EPC-mode.