Haryana grapples with slow speed of expressway

An ambitious road expressway project with the potential of easing traffic flow passing through the national capital is crawling.

With deadlines for the project - originally to be completed in November 2009 - not being met repeatedly, the Haryana government has said it will be taken away from the present private concessionaire and given to the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI).

Haryana's new Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar has announced that the government wants the Kundli-Manesar-Palwal (KMP) expressway completed at the earliest. "The company which had been awarded the work of KMP Expressway has been halting the project for long," Khattar said.

The final decision on handing over the project to the NHAI will be taken after the matter pending before the Supreme Court is decided.

The 135-km expressway will ease the flow of traffic, especially heavy vehicles like trucks, passing through Delhi.

The significance of the expressway is not only that it will connect four major national highways NH-1 (Delhi-Ambala-Amritsar), NH-2 (Delhi-Agra-Varanasi-Dankuni), NH-8 (Delhi-Jaipur-Ahmedabad-Mumbai) and NH-10 (Delhi-Hisar-Fazilka-India-Pakistan border), but it will substantially reduce the traffic from north Indian states to central, western and south India and vice versa.

The traffic, which now passes through Delhi, will be able to bypass the national capital.

Originally slated to be completed in November 2009, the nearly Rs.1,900 crore expressway has missed several deadlines despite the construction company claiming that work was proceeding on a war footing.

After failing to rope in the concessionaire, M/s KMP Expressways Ltd (a consortium of DSC Ltd and Apollo Enterprises), the Haryana government said in November 2011 that it would invoke penal action.

The concessionaire took the matter to the Supreme Court.

The state government had claimed that the concessionaire had achieved physical progress of 63.90 percent till October 2011 at a cost of over Rs.946 crore against the original and revised targets of 100 percent completion.

The Haryana government had warned the concessionaire regarding the tardy pace of work. The then chief minister, Bhupinder Singh Hooda, was particularly annoyed and had himself inspected the expressway site and done aerial inspection of the project.

He even gave a dressing down to the officials of the private company but the project continued to move at a snail's pace.

(Jaideep Sarin can be contacted at jaideep.s@ians.in)