NEW DELHI: To expedite construction of national highways and cut down on time for final approval, Centre has decided to further streamline the formalities during pre-bidding process.
The Ministry of Road, Transport and Highways has issued a directive to all states asking to share complete detailed project report (DPR) with all the bidders to reduce the time and effort spent in responding to pre-bid queries.
The ministry has already missed the annual highway construction target of 15000 km in 2016 and Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari had advised officers to take measures to complete pending highways at faster pace. The Centre has set an ambitious target of nearly doubling available 96,000 km of national highways to 200,000 kilometers by 2019.
“The ministry and its implementing agencies are involved in development/construction of National Highways network under various schemes every year through bidding process which involves Technical and financial evaluation of all received bids under competitive bidding process. The Technical Evaluation is preceded by submission of pre-bid queries from potential bidders,” said the directive issued June 1.
It further says that in order to reduce the time and effort spent in responding to pre-bid queries, it is now mandated that complete DPR will be shared with all the bidders along with the RFP.
The ministry has also issued a check list of details to be shared with the bidders.
“This checklist shall be used by MoRTH and all its implementation agencies at the time of inviting RFP for any civil construction contract, to ensure that all documents mentioned in the check-list are uploaded on the e-procurement site along with the RFP,” it said.
The ministry has been taking measures to streamline the rules to do away with delays caused by land acquisition. In 2016, the ministry approved to acquire land through private consent in cases where a plot has been left out of bulk acquisition and extra land is needed for project implementation at later stage.
Replying to a question in Lok Sabha during budget session, Minister of State for Road Transport and Highways Pon Radhakrishnan had also said that the slow speed of construction of national highway is mainly due to land acquisition.
The others other reasons for delay include utility shifting, non-availability of soil/aggregates, poor performance of contractors, issues with Railways, public agitation for additional facilities and arbitration disputes with contractors.