New Delhi, October 22
The National Highway Authority of India (NHAI) today told the Supreme Court that the company which was given the contract for constructing the 291-km Panipat-Jalandhar highway had not done complete work even on one square inch of the road.

Arguing before a Bench comprising Justices Gyan Sudha Misra and Pinaki Chandra Ghose, senior counsel Indu Malhotra said though the company, Soma Isolux, was claiming that 70 per cent of the work was over on the Rs 4,500 crore project, no stretch of the highway was ready with all the layers laid as specified in the contract.

Malhotra made the statement while responding to a query by the Bench on the distance between the toll plazas at Karnal and Ambala and the completed stretch of the six-lane highway.

Strongly opposing the company’s plea for shifting the toll plazas to different locations, NHAI disputed the contractor’s logic behind the move. The company was claiming that shifting was necessary to plug leakage of toll revenue arising from vehicles bypassing the plazas, but the real reason was to bring vehicles from additional areas under the purview of toll collection and earn as much as Rs 1,000 crore more every year, the authority said.

The additional areas sought to be covered by the company had not been taken into account while finalising the terms of the bid for awarding the contract for the project, the NHAI argued. Had it been taken into account, the terms would have been quite different.

However, the Bench wanted to know as to why the authority had inserted a clause in the contract with a provision for shifting of the toll plazas and subsequently granted in principle consent as well.

The NHAI said the approval was subject to endorsements by an independent engineer and the Centre, which decided the toll. The independent engineer and a safety expert had rejected the plea for shifting the plazas three times, citing financial implications and safety.

The NHAI also maintained that while accepting the contract the company had agreed to run the three toll plazas at the pre-existing places. Further, the company has been collecting toll from May 2009 even before beginning work on the project and earning about Rs 304 crore a year since then. The arguments remain inconclusive.

The company has come to the SC challenging the HC verdict cancelling the contract. The SC stayed the HC verdict on June 12 and allowed the company to go ahead with the work. But NHAI today contended that the construction work was at a standstill with the company insisting on shifting the plazas before resuming the project.