As many as 16 road projects, collectively worth Rs 20,000-crore are awaiting clearances from the Environment Ministry at various levels. This is in stark contradiction to the claims made by the Ministry of Roads, Transport and Highways (MoRTH) in a written reply to the lok Sabha last December that only four projects were awaiting “formal” Environment Ministry clearance.
In about 20 per cent of the 16 projects, developers served termination notice to National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) after suffering financial losses due to incessant delays in getting clearances. NHAI chairman RP Singh shot off a letter to MoRTH Minister Oscar Fernandes saying that the “misplaced enthusiasm” of the Environment Ministry in making both environment and forest clearances mandatory for road projects, have cost the infrastructure dearly.
In his letter, Singh said that projects worth about Rs 20,000-crore are facing severe delays, which had also forced the NHAI to approach the Supreme Court but the situation has not improved since. “The Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) eventually changed the policy, but the revision came with a lag of nearly 18 months, by which time these projects had undergone substantial cost escalations. We could only partially redeem ourselves through the relaxations provided by MoEF,” the letter said.
“land, as promised, could not be given. Environment and forest clearances were delayed abnormally and aggregates and sand became scarce due to court pronouncements,” the letter said. In January 2012, the Supreme Court banned mining of all minor minerals which included ordinary earth — a key component in building roads — without mandatory environment clearances.
“The situation has been tense in the road sector. The MoEF had tried to resolve several bottlenecks, mainly the requirement of special exemption or No Objection Certificate under the Forest Rights Act, which was a must for strengthening or widening of the National Highways (NH),” said an official from MoRTH.
“MoEF had also de-linked the grant of environment clearance from the forest clearance for linear projects and treated the strengthening or widening NH projects differently from the new projects. But these measures haven’t helped the new projects which are stuck,” he said. Singh also wrote about the 40 road projects that were bagged by private developers and that have been struggling to start work or be completed.
Referring to non-payment of premiums by these private developers after bagging projects, Singh in his letter said that the NHAI could have terminated the contracts and blacklisted developers for failing to fulfil their contractual obligation, but such an action would have meant that a vast majority of private operators in the sector would have been in the “doghouse”. Singh in his letter blamed the Government for not fulfilling their contractual obligations on projects given under build-operate-transfer deals.