Ministry puts highway projects in fast lane

New Delhi, August 15 : With the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) and the Ministry of Shipping, Road Transport & Highways under fire for their sluggish performance in building roads, the ministry has started actively monitoring the awarding of projects. The bidding process has been hit by a massive delay ever since the Planning Commission introduced the new Request for Qualification (RFQ) norms for road projects in December 2007.

The ministry has now created eight groups in the NHAI to evaluate bids for National Highways Development Programmes (NHDPs) III and IV and will soon have a separate joint secretary to handle all Public-Private-Partnership (PPP) projects to expedite the whole process.

"Each group with five officials on board will evaluate these bids in a time-bound manner and the process has already begun," ministry sources said.

Nearly 40 NHDP projects are pending at RFQ stage with the NHAI. "While usually it would take some 10 to15 days to evaluate RFQs, ever since the new technically complex RFQ formats have been introduced, the process is taking over a month," said an NHAI official.

The Planning Commission pulled up NHAI in May this year for delay in awarding projects when a review of NHAI works was conducted. It pointed out that NHAI was taking 20 months on an average to award a project against the set time-frame of five months. NHAI had then argued that the slowdown is because the Government is yet to notify and approve the new toll rules and the Model Concession Agreements (MCA) and it was the Government's rules on short-listing, evaluation and verification of Request for Quotation (RFQ) documents that were delaying the award of projects.

While the model RFQ was formulated to ensure that only serious bidders with high credentials stayed in the fray so that inefficiencies and delays during project implementation could be avoided, it has inadvertently become a cause for delays, as these RFQs also require technical staff for evaluation. NHAI is facing a shortage of technical staff for some time now.

These RFQs call for short-listing six players for infrastructure projects at the pre-bid stage based on an evaluation of applicants' experience in infrastructure projects, with the top six making it to the financial bid stage.

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