It is building 10 km roads a day, but the target is just the double
New Delhi: The Centre’s ambitious target of building 20-km national highways road a day is becoming tough to achieve. After the problems of land acquisition, Naxal movement and forest clearances, some states’ declination to support the national highway programme has made the going tougher. With the states preferring to build their own roads, the highway projects worth crores could fall flat, experts reckon.
The states that have signed the State Support Agreement (SSA) include Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Rajasthan, Tripura, Uttarakhand, West Bengal and the union territory of Chandigarh. However, states like Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Delhi, Tamil Nadu and Jammu & Kashmir refused to sign on the dotted lines.
While Karnataka, Bihar and Kerala have agreed to support Centre’s projects, they have not signed the SSA. UP alone has national highways projects in excess of Rs 20,000 crore.
The agreement is an umbrella pact that calls for all necessary support from the state. It ensures support in the matters of land acquisition, providing right of way, removal of encroachments, shifting of utilities, rehabilitation and maintaining local law and order and so on. The understanding is important as it gives confidence to concessionaires and lenders of national highway projects and enables them reach faster financial closure.
In the absence of SSA, National Highways Authority of India (NHAI), the nodal body for carrying out national highways projects, has to approach states for approval for each and every project.
Although the Centre has used all means to convince states to come on board, some states like Uttar Pradesh have squarely rejected the appeals. Acknowledging the danger of such rejections, road transport & highways minister Kamal Nath had, in one of the recent meetings, threatened not to provide any financial and administrative help to those who don’t sign the SSA. But the threat has had no effect till date.
The key reason of not signing the agreement, as per experts, is a provision in SSA that stops states from building competing roads.
Uttar Pradesh, for example, is working on several expressways that run parallel to the projects planned by NHAI. UP government’s pet project of Ganga Expressway, which connects Greater Noida to Ballia, is competing, in SSA’s terms, with part of a project that links Muzaffarnagar to Haridwar.
If UP signs SSA, the Ganga Expressway would have to be shelved by virtue of non-competing clause. The state is also not complying with...