NEW DELHI: Perturbed over high number of complaints against poor maintenance of national highways (NHs) during monsoon, Union road transport minister Nitin Gadkari has ordered his ministry to conduct an “end-to-end investigation” of both Sohna-Vadodara stretch of the Delhi-Mumbai and Amritsar-Jamnagar expressways. The minister has instructed that the investigation must be carried out by the Central Road Research Institute (CRRI) at the earliest.
In another direction, Gadkari has instructed the ministry to probe the maintenance issues of Eastern Peripheral Expressway (EPE), which works as a bypass for Delhi. The minister has referred to his recent experience on the 135-km expressway when he had gone to participate in a plantation drive.
The minister has sought fixing accountability and taking strictest action against those responsible. Sources said the minister is aggressively pursuing investigation into such cases after the recent incidents.
A few days before the plantation event, there were reports of a portion of Delhi-Mumbai expressway caving in Rajasthan and a huge pothole on the recently built Amritsar-Jamnagar economic corridor. Videos of these stretches had gone viral on social media, prompting the minister to order immediate rectification and to initiate action against the contractor and officials concerned.
In the case of the Amritsar-Jamnagar project, the NHAI imposed Rs 50 lakh fine on the contractor for not attending to the defects timely and two engineers of the Authority Engineer (AE) were terminated for poor supervision and lapses. A site engineer was sacked and show cause notices were issued to two NHAI officials. Even in the case of Sohna-Mumbai expressway, NHAI took similar action against the contractor, engineers and officials concerned.
Warning that none will be spared for the negligence and poor maintenance of highways, Gadkari at the plantation event had said that both domestic and foreign contractors would be blacklisted. “Now we want to make a record of retiring non-performing officers and blacklisting contractors who fail to do good work and maintain stretches with them after we have created records in highway construction. We will not spare bad highway builders. We will ensure bank guarantees of such players are forfeited and they are not allowed to bid for new works,” he had said.