Minister for road transport and highways and shipping Nitin Gadkari, while expressing hopes that the vital sectors of road transport and shipping would contribute more than 2% to the country’s GDP in the next two years and create nearly 25 lakh new jobs has said that it is a difficult work but we will try to accomplish it.
The minister stated that the government is planning to launch 1,231 projects for 37,000 km to meet its target for highways sector this year. Confident of achieving the target of constructing highways up to 30 km per day by 2016-17, Gadkari said they had already achieved an average of 13 km a day compared to 3 km during UPA regime. The minister said that apart from the existing Rs 2.25 lakh crore work going on for construction of 37,000 km of roads, projects of Rs 3.5 lakh crore would be awarded in the next six months. And with that, the target of achieving 30 kms of road per day in two years would be exceeded.
In 2014-15, the government awarded contracts of Rs 45,000 crore and was able to construct 8,000 kms of road compared to 3,621 km a year earlier. The highways ministry is also planning to build better connectivity to the religious circuits including the Shriram Circuit, Buddha Circuit and Ajmer Sharif, and also the 1,100 km Chardham .
Highlighting signs of revival in public-private partnership projects, Gadkari said that we have five new projects that have attracted bidders under the public-private partnership model and 17 more are in the final stages of being awarded using the hybrid model. The five projects include Solapur-Bijapur, Shivpuri-Devas, Raipur-Bilaspur, Hospet-Chitradurg and Delhi- Mukarma highways.
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