Cabinet note, draft bill on road regulatory authority shortly

The government will shortly circulate a draft Cabinet note along with a draft bill for setting up of a regulatory authority for the road sector to address issues such as financial stress and construction risk.
"Both the draft Cabinet note and draft bill for creation of Regulatory Authority will be circulated shortly," says a budget document tabled in Parliament today by Finance Minister P Chidambaram.
The road construction sector has reached a certain level of maturity but it faces challenges not envisaged earlier like financial stress, enhanced construction risk and contract management issues that can be best addressed by the authority, the document said.

The key functions of the proposed regulator are likely to be tariff setting, regulation of service quality, assessment of concessionaire claims, collection and dissemination of sector information, service-level benchmarks and monitoring compliance of concession agreements, among others.
While presenting the Budget for 2013-14 last year, Chidambaram had said an independent regulatory authority would be constituted during the year to address issues such as financial stress, construction risk and contract management in the sector.
The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways was contemplating the proposal for a long time as it is of the view that regulation would improve the quality of road projects.

While tabling the interim Budget for 2014-15, Chidambaram said country's rural road network has expanded over seven times at 3.89 lakh kilometres in the last ten years.
Despite bottlenecks, in the the nine months of the current fiscal (2013-14) 3,928 km of National Highways and 39,144 km of rural roads were under PMGSY were added, he said.
Chidambaram also said efforts were on to remove the logjam in the sector.