The Centre on Tuesday said road construction work in the country has gone up substantially in comparison to the past and award of contract has also seen a five-fold increase.
With reports in The Pioneer last week stating that only 50 per cent of the national highway projects were completed, Road Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari said the award of highways was barely 3,620 km in 2013-14 while construction was 4,260 km.
“Of the 9,829 km constructed last fiscal, the Ministry through State PWDs awarded 6,167 km while NHAI and NHIDCl shares stood at 3,071 km and 591 km respectively,” said Gadkari at a Press conference where he shared projects details of past few years. He said of the total awards of 17,055 km, the share of the Ministry, the NHAI and the NHIDCl stood at 8,651 km, 7,397 km and 1,006 km respectively. He said the Ministry spent Rs 1.16 lakh crore on highways construction in the last fiscal of which Rs 50,385 crore was the IEBR raised by the NHAI.
Gadkari said India will adopt global norms for calculating highways construction from this fiscal after hitting a record 26.92 km road building per day in FY2017-18, which as per international standards is 94.18 lane km. “A record 9,829 km of highways were constructed in 2017-18 which comes to 26.92 km of roads per day while the road awards stood at 17,055 km in the just concluded fiscal, thus witnessing about two-folds and five-folds increase in construction and awards of roads respectively” said the Minister.
“We are adopting international norms for highways construction from this fiscal. The Ministry has so far been calculating construction of National Highways in linear length, which means there is no difference between 1 km of 2-lane with paved shoulders and 1 km with 6-lanes and service roads,” Gadkari said.
“This is not as per internationally adopted norms and the correct position is captured through counting of lane km, Gadkari said.
“Internationally, one standard lane width in the US is 3.7 metres, it varies between 2.75 and 3.25 metres in Europe and 3.5 metres in Germany. As per Indian standards, the width of one lane is prescribed as 3.5 metres,” the minister elaborated.
He said going by international norms, India constructed 34,378 lane km of highways in 2017-18 which comes to 94.18 lane km a day last fiscal. This in linear length wise comes to 26.92 km a day and 9,829 km in the year.