Road to nowhere: Highway hangs fire

It will remain so for quite some time: just as the four-lane charcoal carpet on the 260-km stretch between Delhi and Jaipur began, the Surface Transport Ministry cancelled the contract for the 125-km stretch from Gurgaon to Kotputli last week.

Ten months into the contract, the Ministry discovered that the company awarded with the Rs 302-crore four-lane contract, the Birla GTM Entrepose, had submitted an “incorrect representation.” The Asian Development Bank (ADB), which is funding the project, had set a condition that work must be awarded to a joint venture involving a multinational company.

The National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) officials say the Birla GTM did not have collaboration with Entreprise Jean Lefebvre (EJL), a French multinational, which was claimed as its main partner in the tender.

The work has been abandoned as the NHAI is locked in negotiations with two other companies-the Ansals-Daewoo and the Hyderabad-based company B Somaiya Construction Company, which has a Malaysian partner. These companies were the next lowest bidders in the tender filed for carpeting the stretch from Gurgaon to Kotputli.

Senior officials in the NHAI allege that the Birla GTM used the name of the French company EJL to grab the project. But Birla GTM maintains that EJL backed out after the project was awarded in August 1996.

Work was to be completed by end of 1999. The company subcontracted the work to two other companies – Alcov Industries and Uppal Engineering Company – in January this year. The only work to their credit was they cut thousands of trees from the 125-km long stretch, where the road was to be constructed.

When the NHAI wrote to all the leading partners of the Birla GTM on the slow progress of the work, asking them for an emergency meeting, EJL wrote back to NHAI, saying that it had nothing to do with this project.

When contacted, the Birla GTM’s PR agency, Perfect Relations, on behalf of the company’s Executive Director Sunil Bhandari, claimed that after getting the project, EJL of France “changed its mind and policy for business in India”.