Centre cuts corners in revised highway plan

New Delhi, December 9: The government will merge the 7,000km cross-country highway proposed by prime minister AB Vajpayee with the ongoin...

New Delhi, December 9: The government will merge the 7,000km cross-country highway proposed by prime minister AB Vajpayee with the ongoing programme for multi-laning existing highways connecting the country’s four metros. In addition, it will create `spurs’ and `spines’ or extensions from the existing highways to create a multi-laned cross-country corridor, but at a vastly lower cost than the one announced by the PM two months ago.

This new `national highway development project’ was announced by secretary in the prime minister’s office NK Singh and surface transport minister M Thambi Durai after a meeting of the taskforce on infrastructure on Wednesday.

Thambi Durai also said that the government was considering putting a cess on consumption of diesel, similar to the one currently put on petrol, to fund this highway. He added: "Our ministry has insisted that the funds got this way must be used only for the development of the roads, perhaps through a dedicated fund." This runs contrary to the normalpractice where all cesses are routed to the Consolidated Fund of India and are then cleared by the finance ministry depending on its spending priorities.

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The one rupee cess on petrol, announced in the budget this year, and earmarked for the National Highways Authority, for example, has still not been allocated to it by the finance ministry. Thambi Durai said that apart from government financing, private participation was also expected for the proposed network. He pointed out that the government has also finalised the bid document for attracting private participation in the project. He said that surface transport ministry had also sent a proposal for creation of "national expressway authority" for consideration of the cabinet.

Singh said that the new merged proposal of highways will cost anywhere between Rs 36,000 crore and Rs 38,000 crore and will be completed within seven years. He said that the original golden quadrilaterl work was estimated to have cost around Rs 20,000 crore.

This new project,according to experts in the ministry of surface transport, will make the new proposed highway network a lot more economical than the one proposed by the prime minister at his FICCI meeting in October. The existing proposal to multi-lane the existing highways connecting the country’s four metros — two-lane highways are to be four-landed and four-lane ones are to be six-laned — is referred to as the golden quadrilateral programme.

In addition to Singh and Thambi Durai, the task force meeting was attended by task force chairman and external affairs minister Jaswant Singh, civil aviation minister Ananth Kumar, planning commission member Montek Singh Ahluwalia and Airport Authority of India chairman D V Gupta, among others.

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The task force also recommended corporatisation of Airport Authority of India (AAI) beginning with airports at Delhi, Mumbai and bangalore. Singh said that civil aviation ministry was preparing a "road map" for the ultimate objective of corporatisation of AAI and "to make the transition aorderly one we decided to recommend that the corporatisation of Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore be taken on a priority basis."