Highway construction moves into top gear

Ammar Zaidi in New Delhi

Realising the limitations of infrastructure development on the strength of private investment, government succeeded in generating hectic activity in the road construction sector by accelerated roll-out of the Rs 58,000 crore (Rs 580 billion) highway project during the year going by.

Nearly four years after Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee spoke of his dream highway project - the National Highway Development Project - cynics have been converted into optimists.

Year 2002 saw rapid activity on the highways for improved quality of roads, leak of which had been considered a handicap for higher economic growth.

Apart from the spillover benefit to construction industry, the government effectively used highway construction for generating employment during a year, which saw drought in many parts of the country.

However, private sector participation in highway development fell short of all expectations and this was not totally unexpected as the government expected only a modest 15-20 per cent of the total funds required for highway development to come from the private sector.

A significant difference in road construction was the introduction of "user-pay" principle. The government decided to toll all new four-laned highways to provide a long-term source of fund for maintenance and upkeep, absence of which has been the bane of the National Highways in India.

However, only a few hundred kilometres of roads are currently tolled in the country as against more than 4000-km in China.

The year marked change in highway construction pattern from PWD supervised civil works to 'bonus oriented' engineering, planning and construction contracts with supervision consultants and introduction of BOT (built, operate and transfer) projects.

For the first time emphasis is being laid on continuous maintenance of highways and private sector participation is being encouraged in financing construction of the highways, which includes cost of maintaining the highways over the concession period.

However, there still exist distortions in demand-supply for both capacity and quality.

While traffic increased manifold, the aggregate length of roads increased only marginally and the consequent effects are felt in the increasing congestion and travel costs particularly for goods transport.

Of the 58,077 km National Highway network, only 2,534 kms are four-laned.

This was a direct consequence of states failing to put to use the entire money allocated for road development and maintenance. Of the Rs 900 crore (Rs 9 billion) allocated annually from the cess on petrol and diesel, average utilisation for development of road network is less than 40 per cent.

Besides, central grant of over Rs 6600 crore (Rs 66 billion) for development and maintenance of state roads too has remained largely unutilised.

Village connectivity still remains a problem. States continued to divert the massive corpus of Rs 2500 crore (Rs 25 billion) meant for rural roads. Only 37.5 per cent of villages with population less than a thousand were connected by roads.

There are about 262,000 unconnected villages/habitations in the country. Besides the capacity and quality state highways and many of the urban roads is very poor.

-- PTI

2002: The Year That Was