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Road development efforts in the slow lane
Girja Shankar Kaura/TNS

New Delhi, October 4
Twenty kilometres a day was always ambitious, but faced with land acquisition and funding, the Road Transport and Highways Ministry’s record of daily road development has been on the decline.

Figures available from the ministry say that it has barely been able to achieve a fourth of this ambitious target set by former Road Transport and Highways Minister Kamal Nath when took over the hot seat at Transport Bhawan.

The road development has been on the decline on an yearly basis with only 1,784 km completed in the last fiscal at a rate of 4.88 km a day. This is far less than the 2,693 km achieved in 2009-10 at an average 7.37 km a day.

Concerned at the slow pace of development, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had called a meeting with Road Transport Minister CP Joshi last June and urged him to remove bottlenecks to achieve the 20-km-a-day target.

The Road Transport and Highways Minister later said that the target of building 20 kms of national highways a day would become a reality only by 2014, the year the General Election is due.

“The target could not be achieved in the past due to recession. With the speed of project award today, I tell you that before we go for the next elections, we will make sure that the Prime Minister's announcement becomes a reality,” Joshi had said.

Officials say that to achieve the target a large number of projects have to be under implementation. But that has not been happening due to the global recession. All efforts put in by Nath to bring in finance from abroad bore little fruit.

Officials point out that from tendering to construction it takes three years for a project to be implemented and that the pace of awarding the projects has improved.

The ministry plans to award 7,300 km in the current financial year, which would be much more than 5,083 km awarded in 2010-11 and 3,360 km in 2009-10.

Officials say that the land acquisition and financing are key hurdles. Attempts have been made to tackle these. The ministry has acquired 8,577 hectares in 2010-11 and hopes to end the current fiscal with 11,193 hectares. To address the issue of financing, it has allowed the NHAI (National Highways Authority of India) to raise Rs 10,000 crore through debt-free infrastructure bonds.

Experts point out that the situation could improve once these two major hurdles have been tackled. 

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