Govt aborts three highway projects worth over Rs 3,000 crore

The government has decided to terminate three highway projects in Jharkhand, Haryana and Uttarakhand on account of poor show by the developers, National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) Chairman Raghav Chandra said at an event on Friday.

The projects are Rargaon-Jamshedpur in Jharkhand, Rohtak- Jind in Haryana and Haridwar-Dehradun in Uttarakhand.

According to the information, the projects are worth over Rs 3,000 crore.

NHAI had suspected diversion of funds in Jharkhand and Haryana projects while the developer had been facing fund-crunch in Uttarakhand project.

Chandra said the government will soon take a call on stuck projects, which lack satisfactory progress by developers.

The government has recently said it is hopeful of resolving issues related to stuck highway projects worth Rs 40,000 crore, and in case problems persisted then the PMO and the Finance Ministry will look for ‘out of the box’ solution.

As many as 19 projects entailing a capital investment of Rs 40,000 crore were stuck for long and Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari along with Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had called a meeting of the bankers with regard to these earlier this year.

Gadkari had recently said the government is working on setting up a tribunal to clear stuck projects.