Highway projects face delay

The deadline to award 12,000 km highway projects by March 2010 will be delayed by at least three more months. The government stipulates the singling out conflict of interest (crossholding in bid competitors) and other irritants in the concession agreement and bid documents as the reasons behind the slowdown of these 27 projects which are ready for bidding. To expedite road awarding process, the government has empowered the NHAI board to clear single bid for a project after reasonable consideration. As per the new norms, the bidders won’t have to submit request for qualification (RFQ) documents several times in a year. Once they are qualified, the document would remain valid for one year or September 30, whichever comes early. To attract more bidders, the technical threshold limit has also been reduced from double the project cost, being bid for, to the equivalent of the project cost.