Expert panel to monitor quality of NHAI roads

The Ministry of Shipping, Road Transport & Highways is adding four to six lanes across major national highways, as part of its National Highways Development Programme...

The Ministry of Shipping, Road Transport & Highways is adding four to six lanes across major national highways, as part of its National Highways Development Programme (NHDP). However, the Parliamentary standing committee is far from impressed and has raised questions regarding the quality of roads being constructed. It has asked the ministry to appoint experts for “inspection and maintenance of quality and progress of works” being carried out.

“The idea is to engage an independent third-party — preferably a body of experts — to monitor the quality of work implemented by the ministry and the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI). The ministry has agreed to go ahead with this. Regarding the Special Accelerated Road Development Programme (SARDP) for the Northeast, we have invited experts through the Indian Roads Congress to advise us on the issue.” said a senior official from the ministry.

The ministry will soon hold a meeting on the issue and is in the process of framing the terms of reference for the same. Starting with SARDP, the third-party monitoring system will be extended across all national highways projects.

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In its 82nd report in 2004, the committee had recommended that “the Government should evolve a monitoring mechanism to ensure quality of construction, making officials accountable for failure, transparency in implementation process, penalising defaulting contractors, so that the remaining part of the project is completed within the revised targeted period”.

The recommendation was then made owing to the delay in the Golden Quadrilateral (GQ) project, which incidentally is still pending. The committee had then felt that the reasons for the delay in the GQ project were not convincing enough and a third-party monitoring system might help check the delays. The committee has been repeatedly reminding the ministry of these recommendations since 2004 and finally, the latter seems to have woken up.

Experts will be roped in through empanelling of higher level engineers, preferably those retired from government service as chief engineers or superintending engineers either at the Centre or with the state government, over 65 years of age, with a civil engineering degree and 10 years of professional experience.

The expense of empanelling the experts will be met by retaining 2 per cent of the accruals of the state governments’ road funds.