The high-profile North-South East-West highway corridors may not have been announced by the Prime Minister in 1998 with an eye on elections (since he could not have imagined that he would have to undergo electoral rigmarole again in 1999), but it certainly made a good talking point.

Vajpayee has now said that work on the National Highway Development Programme (NHDP), which comprises the two corridors and the Golden Quadrilateral connecting Delhi, Calcutta, Chennai and Mumbai, will be speeded up to finish it much before the scheduled date of 2009. The idea being boosting infrastructure.

The Prime Minister thankfully only announced the speeding up of the project and did not getcarried away like his Cabinet colleague Rajnath Singh, Union surface transport minister, who in his first interaction with media persons, had said that he was surprised by the 10-year schedule drawn up by the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI). Things would be speeded up and the programme be completed in another four years, he had announced.

Out of the 5,952-km stretch of Golden Quadrilateral, 431 km is under execution at a cost of Rs 1,770 crore and by March-end another 264 km at a cost of Rs 1,036 crore is expected to be awarded.

In case of 7,300-km of corridors, NHAI is constructing 224 km at a cost of Rs 670 crore and will award another 60 km at a cost of Rs 220 crore by March-end.

Building roads, just like any other infrastructure project, requires two things-huge investment with slow and low returns, and an executing agency. The government says that for NHDP it has both -- cess money for investment and NHAI for implementation.

NHDP comprises over 13,000 km entailing an investment of Rs54,000 crore out of which NHAI expects to get Rs 20,000 crore from the fuel cess, Rs 20,000 crore as external assistance, Rs 10,000 crore from market borrowings and the remaining as private sector investment.

The truth is that not a penny so far has flowed from the cess into NHAI kitty so far. What it has got is the routine allocation from the ministry of surface transport. What has happened to the petrol cess, imposed in the previous financial year, is not yet known and what will happen to it along with diesel cess will not become clear unless the Cabinet note on a dedicated road fund gets clearance.

Finance minister Yashwant Singh has denied that there is any dearth of funds and has promised that NHAI will not be constrained by financing. Yet, on reading between the lines one finds that he had not given a time frame for setting up of a dedicated fund though in his Budget speech last year, it was said that the purpose of cess was building national highways, village roads and railway over-bridges.

Asfar as getting more privately funded projects started is concerned, the problems dogging the Jaipur-Kishangarh, a model build-operate-transfer (BOT) project, are a case in point. Private participation in highways is still to match the desired levels. BOT projects are needed to be made more bankable for private sector to get funding from financial institutions (FIs).

When it comes to the executing agency which in this case is NHAI, restructuring the authority with an aim to making it more professional and less bureaucratic has been pending.

Almost an year after the surface transport ministry showed its willingness to appoint FI nominees on NHAI board and to provide additional staff strength, details are still being worked out. Officials privately admit that it is all a question of who will control the prospective kitty-some may have to give up powers to strengthen the hands of others.

Announcing fancy projects and fancier deadlines is not all that bad for the nation, provided they are implemented.Moreover, to doubt whether NHDP will serve any purpose may be too cynical a thing to do but its relevance has to be studied in the wider context of integrating transport infrastructure into an organic whole. Till such time the political heads realise this, one can only thank democracy for elections which make or mar the roads.