Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will meet road transport and highway minister CP Joshi on Wednesday as the economist turned head-of-state makes a first-hand assessment of the pace of the nation’s infrastructure development.
After assuming charge of the ministry in January this year, Joshi had said his main focus would be on quality of construction and not quantity. However, the government wants that the pace of construction should increase. Singh will take stock of the speed of highway construction. As per latest available data, the Centre was constructing 9.09 km of national highways a day at the end of December 2010, way below the target of constructing 20 km that Joshi’s predecessor Kamal Nath had set for the ministry.
According to some officials in road ministry, 20-km roads construction target can be achieved only after three years. ?The process to award the project has to be expedited for this. In addition, issues on environment and land acquisition have to be settled,? one of them said. Last year, the ministry awarded 5,100-km projects, while the target for 2011-12 is 7,300 km.
The Prime Minister is meeting heads of all infrastructure ministries to ascertain the bottlenecks. He was to meet coal minister Sriprakash Jaiswal and power minister Sushilkumar Shinde on Tuesday, but the meeting was postponed. Singh had met three ministers of state for Railways, Mukul Roy, KH Muniyappa and Bharatsinh Solanki, along with members of the Railway Board on June 1.
Government officials in the know said delay in appointment of NHAI’s chairman is also likely to come up for discussion during the meeting. The ministry is looking for a suitable candidate for more than a year. In the process, it changed the eligibility criteria for the post twice, but till now, it could not find a full-time chairman. Last August, it re-employed former NHAI chairman Brijeshwar Singh for four months and later gave the additional charge to road secretary RS Gujral.