Union Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari said on Friday that the government may have to terminate five to seven stuck highway projects.
The Ministry has already terminated three road projects worth Rs. 3,000 crore owing to poor performance of the developers.
“Yesterday, we issued the order to terminate three road projects…We will have to terminate five to seven more projects,” Mr. Gadkari told The Hindu on the sidelines of an ‘ITforParivahan’ event by AIM-IT here.
He said there are 21 highway projects worth Rs. 30,000 crore stuck at present. “During the UPA (United Progressive Alliance) government, 304 projects worth Rs. 3.85 lakh crore were stuck. Now, due to our monitoring, there are only 21 projects costing Rs. 30,000 crore that are stuck,” the Minister said during the event.
The three terminated highway projects worth around Rs 3,000 crore were Rargaon-Jamshedpur (Rs. 1,650 crore) in Jharkhand, Rohtak-Jind (Rs. 410 crore) in Haryana and Haridwar-Dehradun (Rs. 1,021 crore) in Uttarakhand. While in the first two projects, which were started in December 2012 and October 2013 respectively, the NHAI had suspected diversion of funds, the concessionaire failed to bring in promised funds in the Uttarakhand project which had begun construction in November 2011. None of these projects had even completed half the work.
To resolve disputes over such projects, Mr. Gadkari had recently proposed to the Finance Ministry that a four-member panel led by a former High Court judge be formed.
