NEW DELHI : Centre saved about 12% in construction cost of the country’s first eight-lane, four-level Dwarka Expressway project from the initial estimates and the findings of official auditor CAG that the project cost was exorbitant and much higher than established cost structure, is misplaced, a person in the ministry of road transport and highways said on Wednesday.
The person, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that all four packages of Dwarka Expressway were put for tender at an average civil cost of ₹206.39 crore per km but the contracts were finally awarded at a lower rate of ₹181.94 crore per km, thereby making a saving from the initial estimates.
In its report tabled during the just concluded monsoon session of Parliament, the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) has found that the National Highways Authority of India’s (NHAI) decision to go for an elevated carriageway on the Haryana portion of the Dwarka Expressway pushed up the construction cost to ₹251 crore per km from ₹18.2 crore per km estimated earlier.
The audit report on the implementation of Phase-I of the ‘Bharatmala Pariyojana’ highway projects, triggered a political row with the opposition parties alleging corruption in the process of awarding the project that resulted in sharp escalation in project cost.
The official said the sharp difference in actual project cost and CAG estimates has come as the official auditor simply divided the total cost of construction of ₹91,000 crore under National Corridor Efficiency Programme with the project’s entire length of 5,000 km under development that brings the cost per km to about ₹18.2 crore. Actually, the auditor’s report did not take into account the cost of land acquisition and cost of building bridges and tunnels that form a major part of the 28.9 km Dwarka Expressway project, the official said.
Questions sent to ministry of road transport and highways did not elicit a response till press time.
While the ministry erred in not putting across its comm-ents on CAG observations during the drafting stage of the report, they would try to convey their comments on the issue to CAG and would submit their views whenever it came up for discussion in Public Accounts Committee.
In the cabinet note on development of national corridors for efficiency improvement under the BharatMala project, the ministry had estimated ₹91,000 crore civil cost of the project but had stated that as some of the lengths of these corridors will have flyovers, bridges, ring roads, the cost for these could be established only after DPRs as there were no cost norms for such projects. CCEA cleared BharataMala project in 2017.
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Updated: 16 Aug 2023, 10:18 PM IST