Highway construction clocks 18% growth rate

Irrespective of the monsoon blues that hit construction work in recent months, highway construction logged a robust 18% y-o-y growth in the first seven months of the ongoing fiscal, taking the construction rate for the April-October period to 23 km/day, as against 19.45 km/day recorded in the corresponding period last fiscal. The overall figure for the last fiscal stood at a record 26.9 km/day. All government agencies responsible for highway construction bettered their tally in the first seven months of FY19 as MoRTH built 3,107 km of highways during the April-October period, as against 2,623 km in the corresponding period last fiscal. The NHAI improved its performance to 1,579 km from 1,375 km a year earlier. The NHIDCL increased its tally to 144 km from 87 km in FY18. During the period MoRTH implements projects largely via the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) route wherein the government bears all project costs. NHAI projects are now increasingly being built through the hybrid annuity model (HAM), an improved version of the public-private partnership (PPP) model in which the government bears 40% of project costs.