Patna, March 28: The state government has decided to urge the Centre to reconsider its decision to widen only a few national highways (NHs) passing through the state into four lanes under the National Highway Development Project (NHDP) phase III.

Road construction minister Nand Kishore Yadav would personally meet Union minister for surface transport and highways C.P. Joshi in the second week of April in Delhi to discuss the issue.

“To begin with, the Centre had planned to make all the highways under NHDP-III into four-lane roads, but later this plan was revised and only few of them were selected for upgrade. The state government thinks that the NH-31 under which the Rajendra bridge falls across river Ganga and NH-30 under which the Koilwar bridge across Sone river falls should be upgraded into four lanes. Constructing two-lane bridges in the place of existing ones according to the present plan of NHDP-III does not make much of a sense,” Yadav told The Telegraph.

He said though the state stood for making all the roads under NHDP-III into four lane roads, it was putting special emphasis on the above-mentioned national highways because investments made in bridges were done keeping future requirements in mind and having four-lane bridges at these two important points would take care of the traffic load for at least 20 years.

The minister would also draw the Centre’s attention towards the non-allocation of maintenance funds for roads selected under the NHDP-III but construction work is yet to start because of procedural delay.

“One can take the example of the 67km stretch of NH-28A between Piprakothi and Raxaul, which is not being repaired in spite of being in a very bad shape for quite sometime,” Yadav said.

The road is important from the strategic point of view as Raxaul is located to the India-Nepal border and it is also called the gateway to Nepal.

The other major roads in need of repair on a priority basis are the 130km-long Patna-Buxar road (NH-30 and NH-84), the 260-km long Bakhtiyarpur-Purnea road (NH-31) and Patna-Jehanabad-Gaya-Dobhi road (NH-83).

According to the norms, the fund for maintaining existing national highways is provided by the Centre. As the same is not being done after selection of these roads under NHDP-III, the users would have to suffer till fresh two-lane roads are laid under the development project.

The state government does not have the authority to do the same work using its own resources and the state has a bitter experience when it spent over Rs 1,000 crore on maintaining national highways from its own kitty anticipating its approval by the central government.

Repeated requests by the state government for reimbursement of the spent funds fell on deaf ears.

Of the total approximated 1,012-km of national highways selected under NHDP-III, work has been started only on 345km of roads so far. “I will also urge the Centre to keep ground realities in mind and release maintenance funds for those stretches of roads on which work has not been started as yet,” Yadav said.