With the deadline to handover incomplete works from the Border Roads Organization to State Public Works Departments in border States approaching, a team from the Centre has been sent to Uttarakhand, Himachal and Jammu and Kashmir to ease out bottlenecks in the handover process.
“Since the deadline of December 2015 is fast approaching, we want all transfers to be completed within the time frame. The minister for roads (Nitin Gadkari) is also keen on getting the work transferred to the PWDs at the earliest so that the work can get started and roads can be completed in the hilly terrains,” said an official from MoRTH.
“The BRO has sat on these projects for very long causing delays of over 2-3 years on each project. We want to clear up all bottlenecks so that the transition is smooth and there are no further delays,” he said.
last year, the BRO had requested the Ministry of Roads, Transport and Highways (MoRTH) to take back five major road stretches. This was about 50 per cent of the National Highways projects in Uttarakhand and a couple of stretches in Jammu and Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh.
The works were thereafter agreed to be moved to the State PWDs by January 2015, as the BRO had taken the plea of being “overstretched” with other commitments and that it needed to “concentrate more on strategic roads.” The BRO had also cited shortage of machines and manpower as the reasons for poor project execution speed.
Defence Secretary RK Mathur had also agreed to the proposal of phased transfer of NHs under BRO to State PWDs. In his letter to road ministry, Mathur wrote BRO has about 800 km of NH and another 1,000 km other strategic general staff road in Uttarakhand and that they were unable to meet the deadlines as they were overworked.
In September, officials from Uttarakhand, Himachal and Jammu and Kashmir Governments decided that three stretches — Rishikesh-Dharasu, Dharasu-Uttar-Kashi and Rishikesh-Rudraprayag — totaling over 400 km be handed over to the State PWDs by the end of 2013. It was agreed that the rest of the road projects would be handed over in two phases by April 2015 since work on these stretches is going on.
Similarly in Himachal, the State Government agreed to take over the stretch of Wangtu-Powari stretch by April while in J&K, PWD will take over 274 stretch of Batota-Khanabal of NH-1B by next May.