News Detail

• Multi-crore seventh phase of 80km bypass on the outskirts of Ranchi stuck in limbo.Project has always been Jharkhand’s problem child. And its latest tantrum rings around a multi-crore peripheral road that promises to decongest the capital city of Ranchi.A 23km stretch of the ambitious Ring Road is wobbling in the seventh and final lap of an over Rs 600-crore project for reasons best known to the state road construction department, which is directly under the jurisdiction of chief minister Arjun Munda, and its handpicked contractors — Delhi-based Somdutt Builders and Shrinet & Shandilya Construction Private Limited.
• Phase VII, connecting NH-75 (Ranchi-Daltonganj road) with NH-33 (Ranchi-Hazaribagh road), involves a cost of Rs 156 crore — an amount that is likely to escalate — and has missed deadline once since the foundation stone of the Ring Road was laid in 2007 by then chief minister Madhu Koda. The projected deadline now is June 2012.Engineers involved in the project conceded that the job at hand never seemed to end, but they declined to offer any valid explanation why. “The overall progress is only about 39 per cent. However, I am not the right person to talk on the matter. I will be punished if I reveal much to media,” executive engineer N.P. Sharma, who was made in-charge of phase VII some six months ago, told The Telegraph.
• Sharma’s fears are not unwarranted. He is the third executive engineer (after Om Prakash Yadav and Umesh Prasad Sinha) to be monitoring the arguably jinxed project in the past couple of years after the original deadline expired in July 2010. Besides, a couple of months ago, the chief minister had categorically said he would act tough against errant officials.A recce of the 23km stretch last week revealed that the six-lane carriageway, which can drastically reduce the traffic load in the capital core area once complete, is witnessing tardy progress. An 8km stretch along villages like Sundil, Manatu, Tender, Sukurhuttu, Hochar and Sangrampur Patratola are incomplete. And construction beyond Sangrampur Patratola has not yet started.
• While in some places, under-construction bridges are holding up the Ring Road project, resentment over land acquisition is being claimed as the main reason for the inordinate delay by the road construction department. But a spot survey exposed a different picture altogether.Madan Krishna Mahto, a resident of Manatu who has given 39 decimal land for the project, told The Telegraph that he felt proud to be part of a good cause. “I got compensation at the rate of only Rs 1,600 per decimal while the market price right now is over Rs 1 lakh per decimal. The government took land from us at rates fixed by the district sub-registrar’s office, but I have no regrets. I have given land for a good cause,” Mahto said.
• Mahesh Oraon and Bandhan Munda of Sukurhuttu have given over 50 decimal land for the project at throwaway price, but they too affirmed that they didn’t feel cheated. “It is for a good cause. The value of land prior to the Ring Road project being announced was paltry. It was only after construction started that land sharks ventured out to get hold of maximum acres along the stretch,” said Oraon, who works as a night guard at one of the project sites near Jumar river.Surprisingly, despite poor progress on part of construction companies, the road construction department only terminated contract with supervision consultants VKS, while Somdutt Builders and Shrinet & Shandilya, dubbed inefficient by some department sources, continue to hold post.
• Prodded on this discrimination, chief engineer (road construction) Patwari Soren harped on the so-called problem of land acquisition, but with a new twist. “Some places of religious interest fall along the proposed stretch of road. It is a Herculean task to convince the devout to part with holy or ancestral land,” he said, adding that the two contractors had been given an extended deadline of June 2012 after which action might be taken.The seventh and the last phase of the Ring Road is most important as far as easing traffic pressure in the main city area is concerned. While vehicles coming from Hazaribagh side and going to places such as Daltonganj, Gumla, Chhattisgarh and Odisha need to take a detour near Vikas Vidyalaya in NH 33, traffic coming from NH-23 (Ranchi-Gumla road) and NH-75 can do vice-versa.
• At present, work on five out of the total seven phases of the Ring Road, an 80km outer periphery of Ranchi, is being executed. Work on phases III, IV, V and VI are going on comparatively smoothly, with the government engaging IL&FS for the projects under PPP basis. Work on phases I and II is yet to start with the National Highways Authority of India assuring the state that the same would be taken up during four-laning of the Ranchi-Jamshedpur leg of NH-33.

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