Road Runners

- Jayashree Kini Mendes

Development of roads & highways has seen a meteoric rise in the last few years in India. It has created new records hitherto unseen. Ac-cording to reports, the Road Transport and Highways Ministry built 5,759km of National Highways till November this financial year, amounting to 58% of the target set for the ongoing fiscal. The Ministry had set a target of construction of 10,000km of National High ways in the current fiscal 2018-19. The achievement so far, is by and large in consonance with the annual target, keeping in view that the period of three months from July to September is the rainy season, when the pace of construction considerably slows down. So it only means that much work still remains to be done.

Despite the issues, roads & highways projects in India have been progressing at breakneck speed. According to Amit Uplenchwar, CEO, HCC E&C, says, “For the first time, the daily average of road construction has touched 28km per day against the average of 11km in FY2014. The number achieved is the highest ever. These are because of some of the measures taken by the government of India which resulted in this increased pace of construction. Some of these are:

• Higher budgetary allocations in the annual union budgets, [FY19: Rs 71,000 cr, FY18: Rs 61,000 cr].

• Higher rate of awarding the projects: Awarding of highway construction projects went up by nearly 70%, an all-time annual high in FY18. The projects awarded were worth Rs 1.2 lakh crore. This is against 4,300km projects, worth Rs 59,000 crore that was awarded in FY17.

• Speeding up clearances: MoRTH has been given authority to approve road projects of cost up to Rs 1,000 crore as against the earlier process of going to CCEA.

• Introduction of hybrid annuity model (HAM) wherein the government provides 40% of the project cost to the developer to start work, while the remaining investment has to be made by the developer.