Future of Kanha-Pench tiger corridor now hinges on Rs 98 crore

This February, Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari, Environment and Forests Minister Prakash Javadekar and Maharashtra CM Devendra Fadnavis agreed to a Rs 122-crore plan for building a few 50-metre underpasses on stretches of NH7 passing through forest patches.

The National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and WII were asked to identify the spots. In its report submitted in May, WII additionally recommended two 750-metre and one 300-metre underpasses which, NHAI sources said, will cost Rs 220 crore. “We are open to their proposal but we cannot spend the extra Rs 98 crore required for these flyovers. This is a Rs 350-crore project and everyone agreed to a mitigation budget of Rs 122 crore. How far we can stretch it is a call the government and the court will have to take,” a senior NHAI official said on condition of anonymity.

Earlier in 2009, the NHAI rejected the recommendation of the Central Empowered Committee of the Supreme Court for an alternative alignment. Then in 2012, it turned down the WII’s first mitigation plan of constructing animal underpasses over a total length of 11.86 km, saying the flyovers would double the project cost.

The compromise suggested by the WII and NTCA this May reduced the requirement of building flyovers to a total of 2.2 km.

Finally, at a meeting in Nagpur this Sunday, NHAI , NTCA, WII and the state government reached a ‘consensus’ on implementing the latest WII plan. But the issue of additional expenditure, according to sources, is yet to be resolved.

“Our annual budget for tiger conservation is less than Rs 200 crore and here we are talking about spending Rs 220 crore for underpasses on a 37-km stretch of road. We can spend a little more than our budget of Rs 122 crore and they (WII and NTCA) can modify the structure lengths to reach a solution,” the NHAI official said.