Guwahati, Dec. 18: Traffic density on the two-lane, 178km Numaligarh-Dibrugarh stretch of NH37 is more than enough to merit its conversion into a four-lane highway.
This was revealed in the course of two separate surveys conducted by the National Highways Authority of India’s (NHAI) regional office here and the state public works department in November.
The NHAI survey, conducted over a one-week period at three locations in Sivasagar, Numaligarh and Jorhat, puts the current average daily passenger car unit (PCU) on the stretch at 21,479 for all categories of vehicles. The state PWD’s survey, conducted for over a week on the same stretch, puts the average daily PCU at 22,119. The NHAI’s PCU projection for 2016 for the stretch is 27,434.
The minimum average daily PCU to qualify four-laning is 15,000.
PCU is a methodology used to assess traffic-flow rate on a highway, and in turn, to assess whether a highway needs an upgrade or not.
The two surveys assume significance in the light of a reported move by the ministry of road transport and highways to restrict the stretch to two lanes despite the fact that its four-laning was approved in 2005 under phase A of the Special Accelerated Road Development Programme for the Northeaster Region (SARDP-NE) to be executed by the NHAI.
That too, after a high-powered inter-ministerial committee on SARDP-NE had given its approval to the project and after Dispur had completed 60 per cent of the land acquisition.
The traffic survey reports were sent to the ministry this month within days of each other to be placed before the inter-ministerial committee for early clearance of the project, which will then take three years for completion after allotment of contracts on build-operate-transfer (BOT) basis.
Such is the apprehension about the project that the commitment given by the ministry in the Rajya Sabha last week about the project being on track found no buyers within and outside the government.
While apprehensive senior officials said contracts for the project should have been awarded latest by July, chief minister Tarun Gogoi himself wrote to the Union road transport and highways minister C.P. Joshi on September 5, emphasising that any move to scale down the project would be a serious setback to the development of the road communication network in the entire Northeast, and would run contrary to the announcement made by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
Singh had announced the four-laning of the Nagaon-Jorhat-Dibrugarh stretch during the foundation-stone laying ceremony of National Institute of Design on February 19. Gogoi also enclosed a copy of Singh’s speech with his letter to the minister.
This was followed by another request by PWD minister Ajanta Neog to Joshi on December 3, seeking the latter’s intervention for early execution of the four-laning work, as the proposal, even after being cleared by the inter-ministerial committee, was pending with the ministry of road transport.
Both Gogoi and Neog had stressed the need for four-laning, as the stretch fell in Upper Assam — an “economically important region”, that accounts for a large percentage of domestic oil production and 75 per cent of the total tea production, not to speak of the coal fields in Tinsukia district.
It is not only the government that is apprehensive.
On Friday, BJP MLA Prasanta Phukan led a one-hour blockade of the highway near the gas cracker project, smelling a “conspiracy” to scale down the project, and moved the Prime Minister, who, too, was an MP from Assam, to ensure that the project took off early.
