New Delhi: A high-level government committee set up to investigate the reasons behind the collapse of the under-construction Silkyara tunnel in Uttarakhand last November has come down heavily on the National Highway and Infrastructure Development Corporation (NHIDCL), which was implementing the project, and the contractor for serious lapses.
Holding them responsible, the five-member panel headed by R. K. Dhiman, additional director general of the Border Roads Organisation (BRO), said the lapses led to “monetary loss to the exchequer” and a “functional compromise in the project”. It further remarked that the “gravity with which such negligence has been committed seems unfathomable”.
The NHIDCL comes under the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways and was set up in 2014 to design, build, operate, maintain and upgrade national highways, strategic roads and tunnels. The contractor for the Silkyara tunnel project to Navayuga Engineering Company Limited.
A section of the 4.85 km, under-construction Silkyara-Barkot tunnel, located on National Highway 134, collapsed at around 5 am on 12 November last year, trapping 41 workers. A gruelling, trial-and-error rescue operation followed, with even international experts roped in. The workers were eventually rescued after 17 days.
The tunnel, part of the Char Dham highway project, is being built at a cost of Rs 1,119.69 crore. Work began on 9 July 2018 and the original date of completion was 8 July 2022. The deadline was missed and after the collapse, a new deadline of 28 January 2026 was fixed. As of August this year, only 60 percent of the work has been completed. Construction work is ongoing.
In its final report, submitted to the road ministry on 20 September, the government panel said: “It is found that all stakeholders (the NHIDCL, Navayuga, and the authority engineer, which is an independent consultant hired by NHIDCL to monitor the project) have overlooked their responsibilities to the extent that the advent of such imminent collapse which was in the making for the last 4 years, went unnoticed by everyone. By any stretch of engineering judgement, the gravity with which such negligence has been committed seems profound.”
Spanish firm TPF Getinsa Euroestudios, in association with Rodic Consultant Private Limited, an Indian engineering consultancy firm, were appointed the authority engineer (AE) on 5 September 2019 for 41 months of the construction period and 48 months of the maintenance period at a contract amount of Rs 42 crore.
The government panel flagged gross irregularities on the part of the contractor, stating that the latter had deliberately misrepresented monitoring data and breached contractual obligations. The contractor, it added, also failed to maintain basic safety infrastructure, processes and procedure as mandated in the agreement.
The panel also came across several safety shortcomings, and said that during the execution of the project in July 2020, the tunnel design was modified by NHIDCL to make it uni-directional instead of bi-directional as was finalised in the contract agreement. The ventilation system was also modified to cut costs.
In a strong recommendation, the five-member committee said that the officials responsible for the lapse “need to be identified” and “penal action” has to be taken against them.
“It is expected that appropriate penal action will be taken by the government against the delinquent personnel/officers, whose acts and deeds have not only resulted in national crisis on 12th November, 2023, but also caused loss to the public exchequer by unduly benefitting the contractor,” it said.
Significantly, the committee has further said that since the collapse occurred due to poor construction practices and failure to monitor the tunnel as per contractual provisions, the time lost due to 12 November 2023 collapse shall not be construed as force majeure (an unexpected event for which no party can be held responsible).
“All financial implications arising out of it, including price adjustment and liquidated damages, have to be borne by the contractor,” the committee report said.
ThePrint has reached NHIDCL Managing Director Krishan Kumar for comment via mail and phone calls. ThePrint has also reached Navayuga Engineering Company Limited and TPF Getinsa Euroestudios for a response on the committee’s report, via email. The report will be updated as and when they respond.
ThePrint has reviewed the findings of the report.
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‘Red flags ignored, tunnel alignment defies basic principles’
The NHIDCL had awarded the Silkyara tunnel project to Navayuga Engineering Company Limited on 31 May 2018 in Engineering, Procurement and Construction (EPC) mode at a contract price of Rs 853.79 crore, almost 24 percent below the tender cost of Rs 1,119.69 crore. In EPC mode, the government funds the entire cost of the project.
When the Election Commission of India had made electoral bonds data public, it emerged that Navayuga had purchased Rs 55 crore worth of electoral bonds and donated the entire amount to the BJP.
The government committee in its report stated that it had come across lapses at all stages of the project, right from the time the Detailed Project Report (DPR) was prepared, till the execution. It added that the NHIDCL, the contractor and the authority engineer ignored red flags at various stages.
For instance, it noted that the DPR consultant did not carry out any subsurface investigation despite the “complex structural architecture” of the area. “The technical parameters of bid for the tunnel has been finalised by NHIDCL without doing any geotechnical investigation, which is a serious lapse,” the panel’s report said.
The panel further noted that despite the fact that the presence of shear zones in the tunnel alignment was highlighted in the Geotechnical Investigation Interpretative Report (GIR), no “advance probing or measurement techniques” were proposed, nor were they seen at the site.
A shear zone is a geographical zone in which the strain is significantly higher than in the surrounding rock, due to the walls of rock on either side slipping past each other.
The panel has observed that the DPR was prepared based on limited geological (GE) and geotechnical (GT) investigation at the project locations and at the middle of the alignment. It notes that even the EPC contractor carried out limited GE/GT investigations.
There were 21 collapses reported in the four years since work started on the tunnel near Silkyara, which the committee notes is unusual in a tunnel project.
Citing negligence on the part of NHIDCL and the contractor, the committee noted that the shear zones were not properly addressed by the contractor. Instead, it further stated, incorrect values of Rock Mass Rating (RMR)—a system to gauge the stability and quality of rock masses—were adapted in the design to keep the rock mass classification as Class IV (instead of Class V, where rock strata is poor compared to Class IV), “which could probably be a reason for the occurrence of numerous collapses”.
This was flagged by the first AE on 25 March 2019, immediately after the occurrence of another, small-scale collapse. The first AE (Spanish engineering consultancy firm M/S Eptisa Servicios De Ingenieria, temporarily hired for seven months in 2019) had highlighted that the strata looked like “Class V” category rock mass.
The government panel in its report further observed that the alignment of the tunnel defies the basic principles of tunnelling. “Inspite of weak zones observed in GIR prepared by the contractor, cognizance of the same was no taken in the design.”
The committee said it was surprised to find that the senior geologist for the project (who is hired by the AE), had not visited the site for almost a year preceding the November 2023 collapse.
Tunnel design changed, ventilation system modified to cut costs
During its investigation, the committee also found that NHIDCL had finalised a bi-directional tunnel with a separate escape passage, as mentioned in the contract agreement. However, in July 2020, the NHIDCL modified it with a central partition wall to make the tunnel function as a uni-directional tunnel. This led to changes in the tunnel’s ventilation system.
The panel further came across severe shortcomings in implementation of the contractual safety provisions. It noted that the ventilation system was modified to cut costs.
In its report, the panel has said that the contract agreement for Silkyara tunnel stipulated a transverse ventilation system—an advanced system to take care of air quality and flow with the support of axial fans and jet fans. The panel noted that this type of ventilation was most suitable for the bi-directional traffic for tunnels upto 9,000 metres. The cost of such a system in a single tube two-lane road tunnel varies between Rs 5 crore and Rs 6 crore per kilometre.
But the ventilation system was modified to a longitudinal ventilation system by shifting the partition wall in the centre and eliminating the egress (exit) tunnel. “The longitudinal ventilation system is considered to be a low-cost solution for ventilation, where the length of the tunnel is restricted upto 4,000 metres and the traffic is expected to be unidirectional and there are adequate measures for smoke extraction through other means,” the report stated.
The cost of such a system varies between Rs 2 crore and Rs 2.5 crore per kilometre.
The committee has recommended a relook at the project’s finances. “NHIDCL management may carry out an inquiry to ascertain the facts that any financial benefit has been passed on to the contractor on account of compromise in the ventilation system.”
Moreove, the ventilation system does not account for smoke extraction in the stipulated time period for safe evacuation of passengers and vehicles in case of an emergency.
The committee further said that there is no separate dedicated escape passage in the design, which is in complete violation of safety provisions for long tunnels.
The Dhiman-led committee has also claimed in its report that then NHIDCL MD K. K. Pathak had pushed the project to finish it on time, ignoring the red flags on the ground.
The committee noted that Pathak, in his tour note dated 12 July 2021, mentioned that “even with the poor rock strata, the contractor should be in a position to drive through the tunnel by October-November 2022 and the tunnel can be opened for controlled convoy movement in December 2021”.
Pathak, the report said, further noted that the tunnel has suffered nine collapses so far. “However, it was lucky that there was no casualty. Therefore, the authority’s engineer has advised the contractor to take due precautions and not sacrifice safety for the sake of speed. The contractor wanted a change of scope, which was refused by me.”
Pathak was not available for comment. This report will be updated when a response is received.
(Edited by Gitanjali Das)
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