The National Highways Authority of India (NHAI), having failed to meet the deadline for awarding 126 projects during the current financial year, has brought down the number of projects to be awarded in the next financial year to 92.

The authority, in its work plan for the financial year 2010-11, has planned to award 92 projects, covering 11,721 km and worth over Rs 1 lakh crore.

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NHAI put the blame for not being able to award a large number of projects on various problems in the clauses of the model-concession agreement (MCA), which defines the procedure for projects to be bid through the public-private partnership (PPP) model.

The problems have now been resolved, with the Cabinet Committee on Infrastructure accepting a report of the B K Chaturvedi Committee. But the optimism is still not visible in the target set by NHAI. The report had, among other things, recommended the relaxing of clauses to make the road projects attractive and financially viable.

The second work plan includes road projects covering 31 km from Phase-II, 854 km from Phase-III, 8,959 km from Phase-IV and 1,265 km from Phase-V. The authority has initiated the procedure for some projects to be awarded during the next financial year and hopes to complete it in time.

“We have started the procedure for awarding all these projects and will be able to award all the projects during the stipulated time,” a senior NHAI official said.

After setting a target of 20 km a day, Minister for Road Transport and Highways Kamal Nath had announced a slew of steps to arrange resources for achieving the target. One of these was announcing a shift from awarding road projects on the basis of the National Highways Development Programme (NHDP) to awarding them on an annual basis. The NHDP is a programme which aims to develop over 50,000 km of roads across the country in seven phases.

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