Highway construction is back on the fast track. After months of dilly-dallying, the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) has finally put on block all 53 road projects planned for the fiscal. The highway authority has been drawing flak from both the finance ministry and the Planning Commission, owing to delays in sanctioning major road projects.
The 53 projects are from NHDP phases III and V, estimated to be worth Rs 60,000 crore and will be bid out on a build-operate-transfer (BOT) basis. While 44 of the projects are under NHDP, nine projects will be awarded under NHDP phase V.
Sources said the technical evaluation for 14 projects from phase III is almost over. Evaluation for the balance 30 projects in phase III and all the nine projects in phase V is in process. ?Once we finalise the projects, they will be sent to the private public partnership approval committee under the finance ministry for approval,? said a top NHAI official.
Infrastructure majors like Hindustan Constructions, GMR Infrastructure, Reliance Energy, Srei Infrastructure, Larsen and Toubro, GVK, Nagarjuna Constructions, among others are in the fray for the contracts.
Announced in 2005, phase III of the NHDP involves the upgrade and four laning of 4,035 km of national highways on BOT basis, at an estimated cost of Rs. 22,207 crore. In April last year,the upgrade and four laning of an additional 8,074 km at an estimated cost of Rs 54,339 crore was approved under the scheme. Phase V envisages six laning of 6,500 km of the existing four lane highways. This includes 5,700 km of the golden quadrilateral and other stretches.
These constitute the first batch of road contracts being awarded this fiscal. The award of highway projects had come to a virtual standstill with the NHAI and the Planning Commission locking horns over the new bidding norms, introduced last December.
The major issue stalling the highway projects has been the cap on the number of pre-qualified applicants who can participate in the financial bid for any infrastructure project that has been fixed at five-six. Additionally, candidates would be short-listed on the basis of a ?point system?, where only the top players with maximum experience in fields such as ports, roads, power and airports would be allowed to submit final bids for a project.
The Plan panel had pulled up NHAI in May this year for delay in awarding projects. The highway authority was taking 20 months on an average to award a project against the time limit of five months, it pointed out. NHAI had then argued that the delay was because of the evaluation criteria laid down in request for qualification. Another reason for the delay was that the new toll rules were not notified.
Incidentally, the government has recently imposed caps on the number of projects a company can bid for. The ministry of road transport and highways has tweaked the model request for proposal document for highways projects, preventing the companies from participating in a bid if they have already been shortlisted in eight projects in the last two months. The companies cannot bid for a project even if they have bid for another project, as a part of consortium in two months.