NHAI COMMITTED TO PHYSICALLY COMPLETE WORK ON EXPRESSWAYS MEASURING 12,000 TO 15,000 KM IN NEXT THREE YEARS, SAYS ITS CHAIRMAN AT PHD CHAMBER

National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) on Tuesday announced that it would complete the process of bidding out roads and highways projects measuring a length of 10,000 km by end of current fiscal, also claiming that 12,000 km to 15,000 km of such projects are likely to be physically completed in next three years, according to its Chairman, Mr. Raghav Chandra.

Addressing a National Roads & Highways Summit – 2016, organized by PHD Chamber of Commerce and Industry here today, Mr. Chandra also declared that NHAI is looking to bid out 30,000 km of roads and highways projects in next three years under the green field road and highways projects’ category.

Elaborating on 12,000 km to 15,000 km of roads and highways projects, slated to be physically finished off by 2019, would fall under expressways category for which the land acquisition would be done by the government concerns and their financing shouldn’t be a problem.

“The NHAI is moving faster to bid out roads and highways projects to establish suitable and perfect national connectivity and it is to achieve the intended purpose with prescribed time limit, in the current fiscal alone, 10,000 km of roads and national highways projects will be awarded for physical construction”, he said.

“The authority is doing its best to construct roads and highways projects as per scheduled such as Vadodra-Kim including Lucknow-Kanpur, Hyderabad-Mumbai, Delhi-Jaipur, Delhi-Jammu and Jammu-Srinagar.  With the completion of work at Jammu and Srinagar 9 km tunnel, the road traffic between the two would be reduced by 5 hours”, Mr. Chandra added.

Also speaking on the occasion Managing Director, National Highways & Infrastructure Development corporation Ltd. (NHIDCL), Mr. Anand Kumar emphasised that his corporation has been trying its best to involve local contractors in laying out roads and highways connectivity in the northern eastern part of the country with equipping them with skills and capacity building training.

He, however, added that roads and highways connectivity in the northern eastern part of the country has been neglected due to poor planning and even poorer execution of the policies that have been skewed and distorted and therefore, called for speeding up the work on these two fronts to achieve the intended targets.

In his welcome remarks, President, PHD Chamber, Dr. Mahesh Gupta emphasised that the NHAI should meticulously plan for green field roads and highways projects rather than concentrating on brown fields projects as the former would be completed faster with quality since in such projects, the NHAI would not have to undergo the painful process of demolishing the encroachment on both sides.

The conference was chaired by the Chairman, Roads, Ports & Other Infrastructure Committee, PHD Chamber, Mr. Ashish Mohan Wig which was moderated by its Director, Dr. Ranjeet Mehta.