With the Border Roads Organisation (BRO) and Uttarakhand Public Works Department shifting road projects back and forth, the Government is having a hard time getting roads built in the border States.
“Both the BRO and the States have been shifting roadworks to each other and we are in a fix. Since the task is difficult for PWDs as they have a lot of projects underway and they are short of trained manpower, even they are pushing us to give back some work to the BRO,” said an official from the Ministry of Roads, Transport and Highways (MoRTH).
“We are in talks with the officials of BRO and of the five stretches in Uttarakhand, which were decided to be given to the PWDs last year, we may have to give them 2-3 projects back. The negotiations are in process,” said the official.
last year, the BRO had requested the Ministry 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 & Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh.
The works were thereafter moved to the State Public Works Department as the BRO had taken the plea of being “overstretched” with other commitments and that it needed to “concentrate more on strategic roads.”
Defence Secretary RK Mathur had also agreed to the proposal of phased transfer of NHs under BRO to State PWDs. In his letter to the 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 Pradesh and Jammu & Kashmir Governments decided that three stretches — Rishikesh-Dharasu, Dharasu-Uttarkashi and Rishikesh-Rudraprayag — totalling over 400 km be handed over to the State PWDs by the end of 2013.
It was also 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 31 km stretch of Wangtu-Powari stretch by April while in J&K State PWD will take over 274 km stretch of Batota-Khanabal of NH-1B by April.