'The scheme excludes tractors, light commercial vehicles, and medium and heavy commercial vehicles.'
Addressing reporters at his residence soon after the meeting ended, Chowdhury said six names came up before the panel for the selection of the two ECs and the names of Sandhu and Kumar were finalised by a majority of members of the high-powered panel.
'Modi knows the people here are opposed to this project, but he is using the might of government to push this port down our throats.'
The Punjab and Haryana high court Tuesday issued notices to the Centre, and the states of Haryana and Punjab, on two separate petitions filed pertaining to the farmers' Delhi Chalo march.
'The vision now is not just to look at national highways as a number of kilometres, but quality as well.'
Machinery and manpower have been deployed, but stones falling from the hills are obstructing the road opening work, the officials said.
'The prime minister took a meeting recently and he asked for suggestions and ideas for a plan till 2047.'
A stretch about 50 metres long on the Rishikesh-Badrinath National Highway near Pursari village is showing signs of land subsidence with cracks appearing on it.
They said the incident occurred around 4 am when a 150-metre-long portion of the four-and-a-half-kilometer-long tunnel collapsed.
A 25 per cent year-on-year (Y-o-Y) increase in budget allocation towards the roads sector for FY24 has led to renewed interest among investors. However, a combination of escalating costs for Bharatmala and unseasonal rains to some extent have impacted progress. Bharatmala's cost has nearly doubled from Rs 5.35 trillion to Rs 10.6 trillion and the finance ministry has asked MoRTH to go slow until Cabinet approval is received.
Maharashtra Congress leader and former Lok Sabha MP Milind Deora has demanded a Central Bureau of Investigation probe into Rs 12,000 crore spent by Mumbai's civic body on road works between 2017 and 2022.
Capital expenditure (capex) by 54 large central public sector enterprises (CPSEs) and five departmental arms with an annual capex target of Rs 100 crore and above has reached around 42.5 per cent of their annual target of about Rs 7.33 trillion in this financial year so far, a senior official from the Ministry of Finance told Business Standard. "The Centre is pushing the big public undertakings in the infrastructure and refinery sector to achieve 90 per cent of their target by the end of the third quarter," he said. The capex by this group of CPSEs stands at around Rs 3.1 trillion in the April-August period so far.
The Delhi-Gurgaon Road witnessed traffic snarls on Tuesday after the authorities closed one carriageway and created a diversion for construction on the Dwarka Expressway.
After the success of the National Highways Authority of India's (NHAI's) first infrastructure investment trust (InvIT) with foreign institutional investors, the Centre is working on a proposal to launch a fresh InvIT for national highways, where domestic retail investors can hold units of the trust
While there was a brief respite from the incessant downpour on Tuesday, collaborative efforts from the defence, national, and state disaster response forces took the lead in executing rescue and relief operations.
Has Vijay Shekhar Sharma given up on the bank? For now, he seems to be on a save-OCL mission. The bank will face its logical end, observes Tamal Bandopadhyay.
The bid to extend the tenure of the present chief secretary is the latest bone of contention between the Arvind Kejriwal government and Lieutenant Governor VK Saxena, who have been involved in a series of run-ins over various issues.
There were no potholes on the road where cricketer Rishabh Pant's car met with a near-fatal accident, a National Highways Authority of India official said on Monday.
Switching off the engine affects the vehicle's braking ability and this possibly resulted in the truck hitting other vehicles on the bridge slope on Sunday, as per a probe conducted into the accident by the Regional Transport Office (RTO), he said.
According to experts, slopes in Himachal have become highly vulnerable to landslides due to cutting of rocks at the foothills and the lack of proper drainage system, and high intensity rainfall is making the things worse for the state.
The authorities also declared unsafe a mosque and a religious school for girls at Nai Basti village in Thathri, 35 kilometres from Doda town along the Kishtwar-Batote National Highway.
Capital expenditure by 54 large central public sector enterprises and five departmental arms, having a capex minimum target of Rs 100 crore, rose 93 per cent year-on-year (YoY) in the April-May period to Rs 1.39 trillion. The National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) and the Railways have started this financial year's capex cycle on a stronger note. In the first two months of FY24, the 54 CPSEs, along with the departmental arms, achieved 19 per cent of their combined budget target of Rs 7.33 trillion, Business Standard has learnt.
'You need to have enough funds to maintain the primacy of public transport and it should not suffer because of lack of funds.'
Union Minister for Road, Transport and Highway Nitin Gadkari on Thursday said his ministry can address the water woes faced in parts of the country.
The central government has finalised GPS-based toll collection to ensure seamless movement of vehicles across the country.
Various stakeholders, including about 600 developers, bankers and officials from various wings, including the National Highways Authority of India, will also be present.
The 100-km stretch of Mumbai-Ahmedabad highway claimed at least 62 lives.
Bommai rejected all the key infrastructure related proposals of Kerala, saying it will damage the eco-sensitive zones and wildlife sanctuaries.
NHAI has already initiated process to handle such emergency situation and also taking all possible measures to avoid such incidents in future, an official statement said on Sunday.
Senior bureaucrat Pradip Kumar Tripathi has been appointed as secretary (coordination) in the Cabinet Secretariat as part of a major bureaucratic reshuffle effected by the Centre on Monday.
While presenting the Union Budget 2021-22 in Parliament, the finance minister said poll-bound West Bengal will see highway projects worth Rs 25,000 crore. She also announced that highway projects worth Rs 65,000 crore will be undertaken in Kerala. She also announced an Rs 18,000-crore scheme to augment public transport in urban areas.
Only NIIF has stayed the course as a viable infrastructure financing institution.
The Centre's ambitious Rs 6-trillion National Monetisation Pipeline (NMP) could fall short of yearly targets for the current fiscal year (FY22) and the next one as well (FY23), partly due to the long gestation period in monetising big-ticket railway infrastructure, Business Standard has learnt from sources in the finance and rail ministries. Officials say the major chunk of railway monetisation will happen from FY24 onwards because leasing some of the infrastructure, like stadiums and dedicated freight corridor, will not happen anytime soon. Rail infra is expected to be the second-biggest contributor to the NMP, with about Rs 1.52 trillion worth of assets to be monetised.
The minister expressed hope that toll operators will respond to his call positively. Earlier, Gadkari had asked NHAI to suspend toll on all national highways to ease transportation of essential goods and supplies.
With the bodies of all the missing workers recovered, the two-day rescue operation ended late on Saturday evening.
A farmers' protest against three farm laws of the Centre, which was continuing on a national highway in Uttar Pradesh's Baghpat district since December 19 last year, has come to an end with the protesters alleging use of force by police.
Union Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari on Wednesday pitched for formulating a policy for using the Reserve Bank of India's rising foreign exchange reserves for funding road projects, saying the country needs low cost finance for such infrastructure projects. Addressing a virtual event organised by industry body CII, Gadkari further said that the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) should also have a financial arm like the power ministry's Power Finance Corporation (PFC). "We have a surplus of dollar reserves in the country. I have decided to talk with the RBI Governor, about how we can formulate a policy by which we can use this foreign exchange reserves for development of infrastructure in the country," he said.
The restructuring exercise of the NHAI includes increasing the number of part-time members of the authority from the existing two to six, who would be from non-government sector. It also includes appointment of six full-time members, against five at present, one each for finance, administration, public private partnership, two members for projects and one for technical.
Road transport and highways minister Kamal Nath had said earlier this month after a meeting of an empowered group of ministers that the government wanted to borrow $2 billion.
If 2019-20 (FY20) was an unusual year for highway construction in India, with the pace of work slowing down for the first time since the Narendra Modi government assumed power in 2014, largely due to the general elections in May and liquidity crunch, the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020-21 (FY21) only made matters worse with lockdowns and labour unavailability. The pace of highway construction in 2021-22 (FY22) has not been able to bulldoze the pandemic barriers in a year marred by two Covid-19 waves - the second at the start of the fiscal year, the third towards the close. With localised lockdowns and restrictions on mobility, highway construction growth in the country has now fallen to a five-year low.
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