On Wednesday, Union Road Transport and Highways Minister B C Khanduri said he had set the ball rolling to accomplish Prime Minister A B Vajpayee’s Independence Day promise of upgrading 10,000 km of national highways. What he didn’t say was how.Disinvestment may be this Government’s theme song but breaking convention, Khanduri’s Ministry has decided that it will not only control the purse-strings of this Rs 40,000-crore project, it will also deal directly with the contractor in the field.This effectively shuts the door on both the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) and the state PWDs, the two implementing agencies for the Ministry.The Ministry will soon invite bids for the first set of works amounting to Rs 2,500 crore for this project scheduled to be wrapped up over the next five years. ‘‘The Ministry will have all the powers. From releasing grants to contractors to settling disputes, the Ministry will be the sole entity,’’ says an official source.When asked why, Khanduri said: ‘‘The NHAI has too much to handle. The state PWDs find it difficult to maintain what they already have. So what do we do? We are yet to finalise whether the Ministry will handle the entire project or a part of it. Maybe some works can be passed on to the NHAI later. But, as of now, the Ministry is directly handling it.’’ His argument is that this project falls outside the ongoing National Highways Development Project—comprising the Golden Quadrilateral and the North-South & East-West corridors—and will involve four-laning of several important highways across the country.So the Ministry has even created a post called Chief Engineer (Special Projects) for this purpose and has appointed R S Sharma—on deputation from NHAI—to carry out the task. He will report directly to the Ministry. ‘‘We are just the four of us now, but we plan to have a whole directorate under an additional director general. The strength should then go up to 30,’’ says Sharma.Who will pay for all this? Official sources said there’s serious discussion on creating a ‘‘fund’’ out of contributions from contractors from within the project amount.This centralised fund, sources say, could then offset the expenditure which might occur to get this directorate or ‘‘core group,’’ as it is called now, off the ground.
