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| RC Sinha, development adviser to the chief minister, during the interview in Ranchi on Thursday. Picture by Prashant Mitra |
Ranchi, Sept. 29: Chief minister’s new adviser R.C. Sinha is aghast that it took him seven hours to drive 130km to Ranchi from Jamshedpur the other day.
He is entitled to be cheesed off. For, the senior bureaucrat, who took up his new assignment a couple of days back, is the architect of the world-class Mumbai-Pune Expressway, where motorists driving at a modest 80kmph are able to do the 110km stretch within 85 minutes.
His prescription, therefore, is an expressway for Jharkhand. “My immediate priority is to advise the government to go for developing a six-lane expressway with no crossings. All roads touching it should either cross over or pass under,” he told The Telegraph in an exclusive interview today.
“It (the expressway) may be Ranchi to Patna or Jamshedpur or Bokaro. It is for the government to decide.”
Sinha believes the basic problem plaguing Jharkhand is the huge deficiency of infrastructure, which shows in the poor development of the state. “If we are able to provide good infrastructure and have a proactive government in place, development will follow,” said the 1962 batch Maharashtra cadre IAS officer.
A former chief of Maharashtra Airport Development Company, Sinha, who is from Rae Bareilly in UP, retired from the IAS in 1996 and thereafter headed Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation (MSRDC) when BJP chief Nitin Gadkari was state PWD minister.
No wonder, Arjun Munda is banking on him to change the face of Jharkhand.
“My brief is to monitor major projects involving roads, industries, power, water and airport every month and suggest to the government the kind of intervention needed to give them a push to complete them in time. I will be submitting monthly reports to the chief minister,” he said.
So far the state government has been making the right noises, allocating a whopping Rs 1,700 crore for developing roads and Rs 1,600 crore for the power sector in this year’s budget.
“Transport is a basic requirement for development. We may use roads for carrying goods up to 300km. There should be competition between roads and railways within distances between 300km and 500km.”
With Jharkhand having only one airport in Ranchi, Sinha’s work is cut out. “We can help Airport Authority of India (AAI) to implement its projects, while we will go for public-private partnerships for state government’s airport projects at Dumka, Dhanbad and other towns. If we have to attract industrialists, we will locate airports near industries,” he said.
Sinha believes there should be no compromise with quality of ongoing national highway projects. “If our engineers aren’t competent enough we should hire technocrats from outside.”
He is also unwilling to accept heavy rainfall (around 40 inches) as an excuse for bad roads. “We have 120 inches of rainfall in Lonavala and yet the roads are intact,” he said.
Sinha has an enviable track record. He has responded to the call of former Andhra Pradesh chief minister Chandrababu Naidu and executed several projects that include an international exhibition centre, a project to bring water from the Nagarjunasagar to Hyderabad city, a garment zone, biotech park, flyovers, and Cybercity.
He is also a hard task master and admits not all officers would be happy having him around. “When I ask them (officers) to come to the office on time and advise the government to introduce a biometric system of attendance, I may face resistance. But ultimately these things get sorted out.”