From Our Correspondent
AGARTALA: After a long dillydally, the Centre has decided to widen the Assam-Agartala National Highway, known as NH-44 at the earliest.
In the first phase, the Ministry of Road Transport and Highway will allocate Rs. 65 crore to face lift 10 km area of the state’s lone highway by March 31 next. Thereafter, the Ministry will initiate a process to identify 50 km and upgrade the national highway by April, 2012 next.
The development came when three Members of Parliament (MPs) headed by Khagen Das met Ministry’s Secretary AK Upadhayaya in Delhi on Thursday.
The development of 50 km highway will be carried out by contractors and Border Roads Organization (BRO) will only oversee the works, said Das over telephone from Dehli on Friday.
Earlier, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh during his visit to the state on October 29, 2005 declared that the NH-44 would be four-laned to boost the road connectivity. Since than nothing visible has been done even after a series of meetings at the highest level.
The proposal for the four-laning of NH-44 was included in the Special Accelerated Road Development Programme- North East (SARDP-NE) following Prime Minister’s promise.
However, the work could not be taken up due to frequent change in plan by the Ministry of Road Transport.
At last the Border Roads Organization (BRO) has been asked to execute the plan in phases. As per the instruction, the BRO started preparing DPRs for the project. But, the Ministry has been rejecting the DPRs citing unrealistic reasons. After fulfilling all observations, the BRO sent a DPR to the Ministry in December last year but the DPR measuring 33.20 km has not been approved yet.
To expedite the project, the state government had already constituted a State Level Monitoring Committee (SLMC) headed by the Chief Secretary to review the works and problems related to it.