New Delhi: With less than three months left in the 2023-24 fiscal, the Ministry of Road Transport & Highways (MoRTH) is unlikely to meet its target of awarding contracts for 14,000 km of national highways, senior highways ministry officials said Friday.
The 13,814-km highway construction target also looks tough to achieve — officials said at a press briefing Friday that only 6,217 km of new highways, or 45 percent of this target, had been built by December 2023. However, Union road secretary Anurag Jain said Friday that he hopes to meet the target.
According to ministry data, till November 2023, the ministry has awarded contracts for 2,815 km of highways as against 5,382 km in the same period last fiscal.
“We will award approximately 10,000 km of new highways for construction in the 2023-24 fiscal. We are working to expedite the detailed project reports (DPRs) of all projects,” Jain said at a press briefing Friday.
Vision 2047 — new high-speed access control corridors
At the press briefing Friday, Jain further said that the ministry has now changed its strategy and is working to develop access-controlled high-speed highway corridors as part of Vision 2047, which will be the next phase of highway development after the Bharatmala Pariyojana programme.
An access-controlled highway is a type of highway designed for high-speed vehicular traffic where all traffic flow is regulated.
The Modi government launched the first phase of the ambitious Bharatmala programme in 2017. Under this, the government aimed to develop 34,800 km of highways running through economic corridors, manufacturing hubs and border and coastal areas by 2024. However, the project is running behind schedule and its new completion deadline has been set for 2027-28.
So far, 27,384 km of new highway projects have been awarded for construction, of which 15,045 km have been constructed, officials said at Friday’s briefing, adding that about 8,000 km of projects under Bharatmala-I are yet to be awarded.
Road ministry sources told ThePrint that under Vision 2047, the ministry plans to build over 40,000 km of national highways, of which 15,000 km will be high-speed, access-controlled corridors. This will entail a budget of approximately Rs 20 lakh crore and will be completed by 2030, they said.
However, Jain refused to say whether Bharatmala would be subsumed under Vision 2047 and if the road ministry would not bid out any new projects under the flagship programme.
“The cabinet will take a final call on this,” he said, adding that projects that have already been awarded are being built. “But all new roads will be built according to Vision 2047,” he said.
HAM ‘preferred mode’ of highway development
The road secretary said that unlike in recent times, where most of the projects were being awarded under EPC (Engineering, Procurement, and Construction) mode and the government funds the entire project cost, the ministry is now planning to bid out more and more projects under the Hybrid Annuity model (HAM).
Under the EPC model, the government undertakes to fund the entire infrastructure project while the private sector partner only provides engineering and construction requirements.
But HAM is a public-private partnership where the government pays 40 percent of the capital during the construction period while the developers invest the remaining 60 percent.
“We have started work to increase the focus of our department towards HAM and BOT (Build Operate Transfer, another public-private partnership model) of highway development,” Jain said.
In the ministry’s interactions with private players who have taken highway projects for operation and maintenance, the general feedback was that roads built under HAM or BOT are superior in quality compared to EPC, he said.
“We are expecting more and more projects on BOT …. The market is very confident,” Jain said.
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)
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