15.5.10

Infrastructure monitoring plan

The government will unveil a monitoring plan for infrastructure sectors next week, as it looks to improve the performance of ministries and address delays in implementation of projects. Planing Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia is expected to unveil the plan on Monday after a meeting with officials of key infrastructure ministries governing sectors such as power, telecom, road, shipping, highways, airport and ports. As per the plan, a committee on infrastructure (CoI) under prime minister Manmohan Singh will oversee the performance of ministries and suggest corrective measures. The infrastructure ministries will be asked to prepare a quarterly report card and publish it on their websites. The CoI will review the performance on physical targets and revenue generation targets for public-private partnership (PPP) projects. The government is building pressure on its constituents to ensure that growth momentum is not lost due to sluggish performance of the infrastructure sector. It is also concerned that the country may fall short of expected investment level of $500 billion in the sector for the 11th Plan (2007-12) period. It is also keen to ensure that the $1 trillion investment target for the 12th Plan will be achieved. Despite the talk of an infrastructure boom in the country, only about $200 billion have been invested in the first three years of the current plan. This also, as per Mr Ahluwalia’s admission, has been mainly on account of a spurt in the telecom sector. The performance of other sectors has been less than encouraging. In the power sector, capacity addition target for the 11th Plan has been scaled down from 78,700 mw to 62,000 mw. This revised target may even be missed as only 23,000 mw of generation capacity has been added so far. The case is similar in road and airport sectors. In the road sector, against the target of constructing 20 kms of roads per day, the government is building only 9-10 kms a day. The port sector is expected to see 40% shortfall in capacity addition during the current Five-Year Plan. The shipping and ports ministry had set a target of taking total capacity at major ports to 1000 million tonnes by adding about 500 million tonnes by the end of 2011-12. In airports, bidding process for city side development of 35 metro airports is yet to begin even though the government expected to complete works at some of the airports by March 2010. The construction work on freight corridor is yet to be started by the railway. Only now the process of survey and land acquisition has started.

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