The Hindu : Karnataka News : State to allow private participation in maintenance of highways

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Aug 13, 2007
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Karnataka

Karnataka

State to allow private participation in maintenance of highways

T.V. Sivanandan

KRDCL prepares ‘Road maintenance and user-fee collection contract’ for the purpose

GULBARGA: The State Government has decided to allow private firms which have been entrusted with the maintenance of State highways for 60 months to collect user fee from road users to recover the investment made in maintenance of roads.

Official sources told The Hindu here on Sunday that Karnataka Road Development Corporation Ltd. (KRDCL), which had been entrusted with the responsibility of maintenance of State highways, had come out with a proposal, “Road ma intenance and user-fee collection contract (RMUFCC)”. Under the proposed scheme, KRDCL had invited bids for road maintenance and user-fee collection contracts.

Successful bidders would have to maintain the roads allotted to them to a pre-defined level of service (performance) for a consideration of a fixed monthly payment, the sources said.

They said that KRDCL had made it clear that in case of a shortfall in the collection of user-fee, it would make payment to the contractor for the contract period. Karnataka was the first State in the country to allow private participation in State highways projects when N. Dharam Singh was the Public Works Minister in the S.M. Krishna Government.

Later, it was decided to extend the experiment to major district roads. However, private participation in State highways projects ran into trouble in places such as Gulbarga owing to poor maintenance of roads.

The sources said that this year the Government decided to bring 2,295 km of State highways under RMUFCC, covering 15 divisions of KRDCL, at an estimated cost of Rs. 229.18 crore for 60 months. In Chikkodi division in Belgaum district, 400 km of roads would be brought under the new scheme of maintenance at an estimated cost of Rs. 40 crore, followed by Hassan district (300 km Rs. 30 crore), Tumkur (180 km Rs. 18 crore), Bangalore 190 km Rs. 19 crore, Mysore and Mandya (144 km Rs. 14.40 crore), Chitradurga (53 km Rs. 5.30 crore), Dharwad (79 km Rs. 7.90 crore), Karwar (40 km Rs. 4 crore), Belgaum (104 km Rs. 10.40 crore), Bijapur (21 km Rs. 2.10 crore), Bellary (248 km Rs. 24.80 crore), Raichur (158 km Rs. 15.58 km), Koppal (154 km Rs. 15.40 crore), Gulbarga (160 km Rs. 16 crore), and Bidar (67 km Rs. 6.70 crore).

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