No project awarded by NHAI since May 26

The National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) has not awarded even a single project in the last one-and-a-half months. This may affect the target of building roads at the rate of 20 km a day, set by Road Transport and highways Minister Kamal Nath.

Since May 26, the day the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) raided the premises of the authority, NHAI has not awarded any project.

Since the start of this financial year, we had been awarding 15 projects a month. This has suddenly fallen.

“We have not awarded even a single project after the CBI raid. The award process of every project is done by a five-member committee formed for every project. Those committees have not been formed since the raids,” said a senior NHAI official who did not want to be identified.

For every project, a five-member team is formed. One of them is the convenor of the team and has members from technical and finance departments.

The official added that before the monsoon months, the pace of awarding projects decreased but it never fell to zero.

CBI raided NHAI premises in connection with the alleged corruption in tendering of the 2,500-crore Nagpur-Betul highways project, which was awarded to Oriental Structural Engineering, a Delhi-based construction company.

The two officials — a chief general manager and a general manager — apart from the managing director of the Oriental Structural Engineering had been remanded to judicial custody.

It has been alleged that the officers of NHAI, in a bid to favour the accused company, surreptitiously provided key confidential, strategic and vital information to the employees of the accused company during the process of tender and facilitated the calculation of annuity by applying financial parameters on the upper side to enable the accused company to fetch huge pecuniary benefits in the award of the contract.

Cash worth Rs 46 lakh and documents of one flat each in Gurgaon, Jaipur and New Delhi had been recovered from an officer. From the residential premises of another officer, located in Delhi and Jaipur, Rs 52 lakh in cash, fixed deposits/NSCs worth Rs 39.5 lakh and documents of two flats and one plot in Jaipur had been recovered.

Since September last year, the highways authority has awarded 63 projects totalling over 5,500 km. Around 150 projects, totalling over 20,000 km, are waiting to be awarded in the coming months.

Also, around 9,187 km of projects are under implementation under various stages of road building.