NHAI threatens to scrap Jaipur eway contract

Taking note of the delay in completion of work on the 225-km-long Gurgaon-Jaipur stretch of National Highway-8, the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) has given the concessionaire firm, Pink City Expressway Ltd, about six months’ time to complete the project. Siddhartha Rai reports.

Taking note of the delay in completion of work on the 225-km-long Gurgaon-Jaipur stretch of National Highway-8, the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) has given the concessionaire firm, Pink City Expressway Ltd, about six months’ time to complete the project.

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Tightening the noose on the concessionaire firm, the NHAI has fixed December 31, 2013 as the deadline for completing all the flyovers and service roads where acquisition of land is not an issue.

“We have told the concessionaire that it needs to pull up its socks and stop dilly-dallying over the construction work under the garb of land acquisition delay. We have told it that the road network, along with the flyovers, needs to be completed by December 2013, otherwise its concession agreement may be scrapped,” a top NHAI official told HT.

The concessionaire submitted that land has not been transferred at places for traffic diversion and that has been the real cause of delay.

“The Haryana section of the NH-8 has been bugged by land acquisition issues, which is why we have not been able to start full-fledged operations on the stretch. Wherever we have got the land we have started construction,” said SP Dutt, project director, Pink City Expressway Ltd.

The NHAI has held a meeting Haryana chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda in order to expedite the land acquisition process. “We will start the land acquisition process only when we get a notification from the NHAI,” said Kulvir S Dhaka, the concerned land acquisition officer, public works department.

The Pink City Expressway project was sanctioned in 2008 and was to be completed by October, 2011. Earlier also, Gurgaon MP Rao Inderjit Singh had sought the intervention of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on the issue of the slow pace of the construction work on the Haryana section of NH-8 between Delhi and Shajahanpur (in Rajasthan).

Starting from Kherki Daula toll plaza, the entire stretch of the highway till Dharuhera village in Rewari district is a nightmare to negotiate owing to unplanned and haphazard construction of roads and flyovers.