E-Paper
Govt set to step up road project awards
Montek Singh Ahluwalia said that the government has taken a decision in consultation with the ministry of road, transport and highways that 8,000 kilometreof road projects would be bidded out this year, a four fold increase compared to the past three years.
The government is planning to give a big boost to infrastructure projects this year. Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia said on Tuesday that the government has taken a decision in consultation with the ministry of road, transport and highways that 8,000 kilometreof road projects would be bidded out this year, a four fold increase compared to the past three years.
Ahluwalia, who was speaking exclusively at a CII programme on leadership via a video conference from New Delhi, said that the developement of road projects undertaken by the Centre was almost paralysed after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the government got hardly any bids for the road projects that were bid out.
“We reviewed the situation internally with the ministry of roads and agreed to modify certain parts of the model concession agreement and the ministry is now confident of bidding out 8,000 kms of road contracts within this fiscal. My view is that one year from now, we definitely will be able to say that activity in roads, ports power and telecom have picked up,” Ahluwalia said. He felt that the recent decision on auctioning of 3G spectrum was a major development and would open up lot of investments in the telecom sector in the next one year to 18 months.
The government has undertaken an ambitious National Highway Development Project (NHDP) which is at an advanced stage of implementation. Key sub-projects under the NHDP include: - The Golden Quadrilateral (GQ-5846 kms of 4 lane highways) - North-South & East-West Corridors (NSEW-7142 kms of 4 lane highways) - Four-laning of 12,109 km under NHDP-III. The
National Highway Development Programme (NHDP), entails a total investment of Rs 2,20,000 crore upto 2012.
Ahluwalia also pointed out that in order to sustain a 10-11 per cent contribution from the manufacturing sector in the GDP, the labour laws in the country needs to be more “flexible.”
“Currently, if a firm has to hire 30,000-odd people, there is a lot of reluctance on the part of the employer. This is not so in the case of our other neighbours. We need to involve the labour unions that making labour laws flexible will be in their best interests,” Ahluwalia said.
