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Our Bureau

New Delhi , May 14

THE National Highway Authority of India (NHAI) has clarified that the CAG report pointing out discrepancies in NHAI's performance has "a lot of generalisations."

While stating that overall performance of NHAI in terms of output in National Development Project Phase-I was 29 per cent, the CAG has only considered fully completed projects. "For example, if there is a road stretching 50 km, from which about 45 km is complete, the CAG has counted it as a failure on NHAI's part," said sources.

"Out of the 27 completed sub-projects in the sample study of the Audit, nine were completed before time and four on time," commented the Ministry of Shipping, Road Transport and Highways.

Regarding delay of projects, the NHAI has called for a need to factor in reasons such as delay in getting approval of projects by funding agencies like World Bank, Asian Development Bank, etc. Moreover, many a times, there are delays owing to difficulties in "land acquisition, utilities shifting, environmental clearances, encroachment removals, rehabilitation and resettlement, local problems including law and order problem in some areas," pointed out NHAI in its reply submitted to the CAG. Moreover, it is important to remember that a lot of these heads are under jurisdiction of State Government agencies over which NHAI has no control.

"The inference that non-standardisation of stretches led to wide variation in costs up to Rs 108 crore appears to be technically misleading since the concept of standard cost per km as advocated (by the CAG) suffers from the basic technical defect that no two stretches having equal lengths can have the same costs of construction which depends upon the terrain, number of structures, availability of materials and labour," NHAI has pointed out.

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