The Development of Roads and connectivity to major towns and
cities has a major role of the Socio- Economic Development of the entire area.
Realising this the Prime Minister had set an ambitious target of
construction of 20
km of roads per day and this target entailed
construction of about 7300 km of
roads per year. This was stated by the Union Road Transport and Highways Minister,
Dr. C.P.Joshi while addressing the 10th Parliamentary
Consultative Committee Meeting of
Ministry of Road Transport and Highways on
the topic “Qualification and
bidding Criteria- RFQ & RFP” here today. He said that the Ministry currently planning
to award 7300 km of roads per year. Once
the level of award is maintained for 2-3 years, this should result the work in
hand of about 20000 km,
and considering 2-3 years project cycle completion of 7300 in a
year. The Government has taken various steps to
revamp the NHDP. Public-Private
Partnership (PPP), particularly, Build, Operate and Transfer BOT (Toll) was
recognized as the preferred mode for award of projects. Extensive consultation with all stake holders
resulted in preferred mode for award of projects. Extensive consultation with all stake holders
resulted in removal of procedural and structural bottlenecks in the award process. Consequently, 2009-10 and 2010-11 saw
acceleration in the award of project with 3360 km awarded in 2009-10, 5059
km awarded in 2010-11 and 4375 km awarded in 2011-12 (upto
January, 2011).
The Minister informed the Members that besides NHDP, some
other major projects are being implemented by the Ministry including Special Accelerated
Road Development Programme (SARDP) NE, roads in Left Wing extremist areas. Thus over 20000 km would be developed under these
programmes outside the NHDP.
He expressed his concern that there are substantial stretches of National
Highways which are yet single lane or
intermediate lane and many of these stretches would not be visible on BOT
mode. The traditional mode of developing
these roads on item rate contract was seen to be inefficient leading to time
and cost over runs. This mode is
proposed to be replaced by Engineering Procurement Construction (EPC) mode.
He said that certain policy initiatives to address other
areas of concern like transparency in award of works, tolling improving the
maintenance of highway, road safety etc. have been taken. To increase transparency and simplify the
bidding process, e-tendering & e-procurement has been introduced by
NHAI. So far tenders including RFP for
BOT projects are being uploaded on the e-tendering portal.
The Minister informed the Members that in 2009 the Ministry
had accepted B.K.Chaturvedi
Committee Report on NHDP in regard to the modification to the existing
RFQ and RFP documents for the road sector.
All these policies seek to achieve our stated goal of constructing safe,
world class road
infrastructure, promoting equitable growth and development. Some of these policies have the potential to
enforce a paradigm shift in the monitoring of awarding of bids for stretch of
works. Our endeavour is to achieve the
goal reasonable.