Reviving the interest of private-sector developers to take up highway projects and prodding financial institutions to augment lending to the sector would be the two key challenges before the ministry of road transport and highways (MoRTH) in 2020. In 2019, not a single project could be awarded through the hybrid annuity model (HAM) and project awards through the build-operate-transfer (BOT) were last made more than two years ago. As a result, there is a huge reliance on fully government-funded engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) route for project awards, and this being a burden on the exchequer, is not sustainable.
Yet, through the EPC route, MoRTH and its implementing agencies — National Highways Authority of India, National Highways and Infrastructure Development Corporation (NHIDCL) — have awarded more lane kilometres in the first seven months of current fiscal, but sectoral watchers say as fund-crunch looms large, the 34,800 km highway building target by 2024-25 would remain a far cry, if the reliance rests only on the EPC mode.
