Road transport and highways minister Nitin Gadkari will hold a detailed review meeting with top officials across ministries and contractors this month on the stalled highway projects to resolve inter-ministerial issues and fast track the implementation of the projects.
The idea is to substantially reduce the number of stalled road projects, which is the highest among all infrastructure ministries.
The meeting is aimed at preventing further cost and time overruns and to enable the government firm-up fresh milestones, revised cost estimates and revised commissioning schedule for these projects, a senior government official told
According to the official, delays in land acquisition and environmental clearances hinder project execution leading to cost overruns and delays. “Additionally, lack of coordination among different government agencies have hampered implementation of road projects,” the official added. The meeting is also expected to deliberate on issues related to project financing, delays in finalization of scope of the project and delay in technical approvals among other things.
Jagannarayan Padmanabhan, senior director and global head, consulting, CRISIL Market Intelligence and Analytics, said since land acquisition is a state subject and involves multiple discussions with affected parties, many a time the concerned parties go for legal recourse which leads to time delays.
“Also land records are not updated and many transactions are not recorded and hence this also leads to time over run,” he said, adding not so proper appraisal of projects at time of bidding also results in cost overruns leading to viability issues. As per the ministry of statistics and programme implementation (MoSPI), 458 infrastructure projects, each entailing an investment of ₹150 crore or above, were hit by a cost overrun of more than ₹5.71 lakh crore as on April 1, 2024 while 831 projects were delayed out of 1,817 projects reviewed by the ministry.
Of these, 399 are projects related to road transport and highways delayed with respect to original schedule while 146 projects are delayed additionally.
