Centre plans to leverage MCC period to prepare over 10,000 km highway contract

livemint.com:

₹2 trillion worth of sanctioned projects are fast-tracked. Slow progress on DPRs has been one of the reasons projects worth trillions of rupees have failed to move ahead and get awarded. The situation has become particularly alarming in the current financial year, with highway awards falling way below the targeted 12,000 km -- indicating a thinning of the pipeline for projects that would impact construction over a longer period.

In FY24, by January-end, only 3,481 km of highway projects had been awarded against 8,400 km in the same period of the previous year. Though the ministry of road transport and highways (MoRTH) secretary Anurag Jain said he's confident awards may end at 10,000 km in FY24, experts put the number a lot below that. “PM Gati Shakti platform has sharply reduced the time for MoRTH to complete DPRs for highway projects from over six months to just about 15 days in several cases.

This would be extensively used during the period of the model code of conduct to complete DPRs of road projects so that awards could be given pace," said one of the two persons quoted above. Queries sent to MoRTH remained unanswered at press time. Deepak Chowdhury, partner, IndusLaw, said the measure to complete DPRs in advance before the new government takes office would help projects take off and also attract private sector interest.

“But the issue of concern is poor quality of DPRs in the country which lack proper research, real-time data analysis and identification of construction risks. Faulty DPRs have led to challenges at project execution stage resulting in cost overruns, delays, at times even faulty designs. Hence, measures such as finalizing DPRs, improving their quality and also obtaining or easing the process of