The National Highways Infrastructure Development Corporation incorporated last year by the Centre for fast-tracking the construction of highways and other infrastructure in North-Eastern region and strategic border areas of the country plans to treble its construction activity by next year.
The NHIDCl, which is a fully-owned company of the Ministry of Road, Highways and Transport awarded 18 projects worth Rs6,446 crore across Tripura, Assam, Meghalaya and Arunachal totaling a length of 600 kilometres in 2014-15 .
For this year 2015-16, the company has set itself a stiff target of awarding 27 projects worth Rs14, 599 crore in Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghlaya, Sikkim and Nagaland. And for 2015-16, it proposed to award 54 projects worth Rs48,000 crore.
“We are a one-year-old company built on the lines of the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI). We plan to grow at least three times by the end of next year,” said Anand Kumar, Director, NHIDCl.
“Unlike, current government set-ups we are completely reliant on e-tools like e-office, e-tendering, e-monitoring and e-access for all our works. We plan to be completely transparent in our processes,” said Kumar, who was speaking at the completion of one year of NHIDCl.
“By the end of this month alone, the NHIDCl intends to award about eight projects, totaling 182 kilometres worth Rs1977 crore,” said Pon Radhakrishnan, Minister of State, MoRTH.
NHIDCl was incorporated in July 2014 with the aim to fast-track highway projects that have been pending with the Border Roads Organisation (BRO) for several years.
“We plan to create several jobs all through northeast in the coming five years. We have had a three day workshop to rope in local contractors for small projects. In times to come, we may see big contractors emerging from the region,” said Nitin Gadkari, minister, MoRTH
“The biggest difficulties at the moment are law and order, land acquisition, limited months suited to construction activity. But we are working on ways to expedite projects in the region,” he said.
Of the current lot of projects worth about Rs 35,000 crore being handled by NHIDCl, mostly are in the North-East while the remaining are in Andaman and Nicobar islands, Jammu and Kashmir, Uttarakhand and West Bengal.