The first two months of the new fiscal have been good for highway construction in the country, with the pace going up by 9.6% to 28.5 km/day during the April-May period, as against 26 km/day in the year-ago period. A revival on the award front is yet to materialise, however, with the first two months seeing 241 km of projects being awarded, compared with 561 km in the corresponding period last year.
Owing to a jump in the last quarter, construction clocked a pace of 29.21 km/day in FY19. As for project awards, the pace had slowed down in the last year of the National Democratic Alliance’s first term in power, with a total of 5,470 km of projects being awarded in FY19—the figure stood at 17,055 km in the preceding fiscal (FY18).
