Dinesh Kamath's news 'Bureaucrats responsible for delay of Navi Mumbai's infra projects?' that was published in Newsband

Bureaucrats responsible for delay of Navi Mumbai's infra projects?

By Dinesh Kamath

NAVI MUMBAI: For the last many years, Navi Mumbai’s infrastructure projects, which can give tremendous boost to the city’s transport system, have been getting delayed time and again.

One reason for this is lack of proper coordination between the state government and private players, who had earlier decided to apply ‘Built, Own, Operate and Transfer’ (BOOT) policy for developing the project.

It’s surprising that no company is willing to bid for the Maharashtra government’s ambitious infrastructure project, the Mumbai Trans Harbour Link (MTHL), to connect Sewri in the island city and Nhava-Sheva in Navi Mumbai. The Rs. 9,640 crore, 22.5 km MTHL is supposed to reduce travel time between south Mumbai and Navi Mumbai from 60 minutes to 25 minutes.

In 2008, it was the global financial crisis that prevented this project from taking off while in 2012 the refusal by all the short-listed bidders to bid for this project has kept the project pending. These bidders consider the state government as a poor pay-master and also non-cooperative owing to which they were not willing to bid for this project. Also the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) has not yet come up with clearance from the environment ministry for construction in the area, which falls under the coastal regulatory zone (CRZ) I category.

The bidders have no confidence in MMRDA’s traffic volume projections. According to them, there is no sign of the Navi Mumbai Airport project taking off as yet, and the sealink is supposed to be closely connected with this project. The real estate people benefited temporarily when the Navi Mumbai Airport project was first announced. But they too are now feeling disappointed.  

Another thing is that the financial institutions are reluctant to lend funds to infrastructure projects. They have no confidence in the government’s way of functioning. These bidders had a bad experience in Kolhapur in the matter of toll collection. They were not even given police protection by the state.

When Prithviraj Chavan became the chief minister of Maharashtra, he showed promise of doing a lot of development works. He appeared to be honest and sophisticated. Chavan also had experience of working in Prime Minister’s Office. But people are losing faith in him and are wondering whether he will take some drastic actions at least now or in the near future especially in the matter of these infra-projects in Navi Mumbai.