Nitin Gadkari seeks more revenue from roads, highways to make PPPs viable

Road transport, highways and shipping minister Nitin Gadkari on Wednesday said he wants alternate ways of revenue generation that the roads and highways can give, which will make private-partnership-projects more viable in road development.

Addressing a Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) conference, Gadkari said that one of the ways is by looking at ways to lay pipelines for gas and water, transmission lines and optical fibre lines underneath roads.

Currently, transmission lines are connected through towers, which he says are very expensive-Rs 25 lakh for each tower.

"We will try to find economic viability of this because it will generate a lot of revenue," said Gadkari.

Gadkari is known for making radical shifts which tend to restructure departments.

As the minister of public works department of Maharashtra, he built the first expressway in the country-the Mumbai-Pune Expressway.

The Worli Sea link was also sanctioned during his tenure. Against much opposition, he decided to induce a pipeline for optical fibre. "This gives Rs 27 crore of revenue," he says.

The laying of pipelines to carry gas, water, electricity and data can revolutionise the infrastructure industry. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has announced Rs 37,880 crore in Budget 2014-15 for National Highways and state roads, with a target to construct 8,500 kilometres of national highways by March 2015.

Even if Gadkari is able to introduce his model partly to the construction, he will be able to solve a lot of connectivity issues. But Gadkari faces an issue.

"There is no technology in India that can do this, and we will have to find out ways," he says.

It is important to bring such revenue model, as the PPP model is already on the brink of a failure.

The government has decided to set up an institution to study the PPP model in India-to look at the regulations, stress on projects, its challenges and how can they be solved.

"This will rejuvenate the model of PPP, which seems to be slowing down," says Finance Secretary Arvind Mayaram, who was also present at the conference.

Gadkari also spent some time addressing the problems and woes of the private investors whose projects are stuck because of lack of clearances.

He announced that no tendering will happen before 80 per cent of the clearances are done. Many projects are stuck because of land acquisition problems and environmental and forest clearances. He blamed the private companies for their state, as they took on projects without getting the clearances.