Corridor Of Uncertainty

Why an industrial hub in Himachal Pradesh hasn’t lived up to expectations, and how NDA 2.0 can set things right

- Divya J Shekhar

Shailesh Aggarwal recalls a rather “embarrassing” meeting with Minister of Road Transport and Highways Nitin Gadkari this April. It was a month before the general elections, and Aggarwal was in Gadkari’s Delhi office to discuss a poll issue in his homestate Himachal Pradesh.

Representing an association of businesspeople in the BaddiBarotiwala-Nalagarh (BBN) region— the state’s largest industrial township, located in the Solan district—Aggarwal requested Gadkari to fast-track the four-laning of the Pinjore-Nalagarh stretch of the National Highway 21A. The minister, in 2017, had laid the foundation stone for the project that was meant to improve connectivity to and from the BBN region, but it has been in limbo since.

What has made matters worse is the fact that the industrial belt—it has over 2,000 factories, including some of India’s biggest pharmaceutical and consumer companies—does not have a fully functioning railway network. The rail project connecting Baddi with Pinjore, approved by the central government in 2017, has come to a standstill.

Gadkari, however, simply blamed the Himachal Pradesh government for the delays. The National Highway Authority of India officials were not agreeing to the high compensation rate for land acquisition that the HP government (reportedly around 9 crore per hectare) has fixed for the four-laning project. “He [Gadkari] asked me to first check what my state government is doing about this,” Aggarwal recalls. The state government, on the other hand, claims they are helpless as the Centre is not being more proactive with the project.