Gadkari Kicks Off Road Projects Worth Rs 60K Crore

Union Minister for Surface Transport Nitin Gadkari has kicked off stalled national highway projects with an outlay of more than Rs 60,000 crores.

Briefing reporters after reviewing each of the projects, Gadkari said the work would start within three months.

“The delays have been primarily due to four factors – problems of land acquisition, pending clearances from forest and environment authorities, cost escalation and legal disputes between the contractors and the authorities. The result has been that the projects have become unviable and we have looked at solutions that are non-confrontationist,” he said.

The minister has been assigned the responsibility of coordinating the process with all the other concerned ministries and the prime minister’s office. A meeting will be held every month to facilitate the process.

‘‘We have spent hours discussing the details with regard to each of these projects and worked out a roadmap for fast–tracking these. One of the solutions is to convert these BOT (Build Operate Transfer) projects into EPC (Engineering, Procurement and Construction) contracts, where the government shall pay the cost of the project instead of allowing the contractor to recover the cost through toll tax,” he said.
Paving the way for getting clearance from the forests ministry, Gadkari said it has been decided that not a single tree would be cut down. “Instead, we shall be transplanting these trees. The technology for this approach is available and the Gujarat government has used this model. Besides, following an ecology friendly approach, this would also help in employment generation as this task would be allotted to educated unemployed engineering graduates,” he added.

He said he would write to all the chief ministers seeking their co-operation for faster implementation of these projects. ‘‘Right now, we achieve a target of 3 km per day in terms of completed roads; our target now is to achieve a rate of 30 km per day after two years. One of the key decisions taken in this context is that no contract for road construction would be awarded unless the land acquisition has been completed up to 90% of the project requirement,” said Gadkari.