EXCHANGE OF VIEWS: Member (Technical) of National Highway Authority of India Nirmal Jit Singh and others at an exhibition held during a national seminar in Hyderabad on Thursday.

HYDERABAD: The Union Government is planning to take up highway projects, a majority of which will be implemented through public-private partnership mode, at a cost of about Rs. 2.2 lakh crores (US $ 50 billion).

According to the National Highway Authority of India (NHAI) member (Technical), Nirmal Jit Singh, the programme requires massive expansion in contracting and consultancy sector, skilled manpower, equipment and improvements in dispute resolution mechanism in addition to substantial investments.

Participating in a seminar on `Road Construction Projects' organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) here on Thursday, he said the Centre had already approved projects in three phases of the National Highway Development Programme while phases IV to VII were under active consideration.

Phase IV would comprise two-laning with shoulders of 20,000 km of national highways while phase-V would involve six-laning of 6,500 km of NHs, primarily the Golden Quadrilateral and some other high-density corridors. Phase-VI comprises construction of 1,000 km of expressways in potential corridors like Vadodara-Mumbai, Delhi-Agra, Delhi-Jaipur, Delhi-Chandigarh, Chennai-Bangalore and Dhanbad-Kolkata.

Under Phase-VII, the Government planned to take up projects like ring roads, bypasses and elevated highways.

V. R. S. Natarajan of the CII said road projects would tremendously benefit the manufacturing industry and would lead to overall GDP growth. He said the domestic equipment industry was, however, facing acute crises due to import of second-hand machinery on which there was no restriction on age. He recalled that the CII had requested the Government to restrict the age to seven years and impose higher import duty on the second hand machinery.

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