India's core projects stuck in paperwork
Big-ticket projects can be floored by problems ranging from endless land ownership disputes and red-tape to competing political interests and out-of-control budgets.
By Agencies |
BANGALORE: Entrepreneur Ashok Kheny has been shuttling between his adopted US home and India for 12 years to build a project he hopes will bring pride to his country.
In those years, he has fought 336 cases in the Karnataka high court and three in the Supreme Court over the 111-kilometre (66-mile) expressway he is constructing to link Bangalore and Mysore town.
He won all the cases but does not know if or when he will complete the $790 million project, which has been muddling through a legal, bureaucratic and political maze since first conceived.
Kheny, who made a fortune building fibre-optic cable networks in the US where he migrated in 1972, said he had expected difficulties but not of such magnitude.
"Of course I feel frustrated," Karnataka-born Kheny, 57, said in an interview. "I have twin teenaged boys and it's sometimes frustrating to raise them, but I can't abandon them. I see the project in the same way."
Kheny's experience illustrates the problems plaguing infrastructure projects in India, which is calculated to need to invest $475 billion by 2012 in roads, airports and power plants to maintain growth of nine per cent a year.
Big-ticket projects can be floored by problems ranging from endless land ownership disputes and red-tape to competing political interests and out-of-control budgets.
Bangalore International Airport, slated for completion in April, was conceived in 1991 and took 14 years for construction to even begin. It is now being executed by a consortium including Unique Zurich Airport and Germany's Siemens.
"It has not been easy," said airport CEO Albert Brunner, who spent as long negotiating the $500 million project as the three years he plans to complete it in.
Designed to handle five million passengers a year, it had to be redesigned for 11 million passengers after air traffic surged. Negotiations had taken so long because of problems over land leases and state support agreements and concessions.
In those years, he has fought 336 cases in the Karnataka high court and three in the Supreme Court over the 111-kilometre (66-mile) expressway he is constructing to link Bangalore and Mysore town.
He won all the cases but does not know if or when he will complete the $790 million project, which has been muddling through a legal, bureaucratic and political maze since first conceived.
Kheny, who made a fortune building fibre-optic cable networks in the US where he migrated in 1972, said he had expected difficulties but not of such magnitude.
"Of course I feel frustrated," Karnataka-born Kheny, 57, said in an interview. "I have twin teenaged boys and it's sometimes frustrating to raise them, but I can't abandon them. I see the project in the same way."
Kheny's experience illustrates the problems plaguing infrastructure projects in India, which is calculated to need to invest $475 billion by 2012 in roads, airports and power plants to maintain growth of nine per cent a year.
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Big-ticket projects can be floored by problems ranging from endless land ownership disputes and red-tape to competing political interests and out-of-control budgets.
Bangalore International Airport, slated for completion in April, was conceived in 1991 and took 14 years for construction to even begin. It is now being executed by a consortium including Unique Zurich Airport and Germany's Siemens.
"It has not been easy," said airport CEO Albert Brunner, who spent as long negotiating the $500 million project as the three years he plans to complete it in.
Designed to handle five million passengers a year, it had to be redesigned for 11 million passengers after air traffic surged. Negotiations had taken so long because of problems over land leases and state support agreements and concessions.
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Now the airport may be ready on time but a 21-kilometre (12-mile) access road to it could be delayed because of a row over a small stretch of the land needed to build it.
"The biggest challenge to infrastructure projects is land acquisition," said V P Baligar, a senior Karnataka civil servant in charge of infrastructure. "We are a democracy, we have to abide by the law and respect individual rights while serving a public purpose."
Land values have surged as the economy expanded, and real-estate prices have doubled in the past three years in parts of the country.
In the case of the Bangalore-Mysore expressway, the latest obstacle came when the Karnataka government said last month it wanted to cancel the agreement with Kheny's Nandi Infrastructure Construction Enterprise (NICE).
The government told the Supreme Court it wanted to hand over the project to a rival consortium that would build a 400-million-dollar monorail and return to the government surplus land acquired for the project.
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The court's decision is awaited. The project dates back to the years when transparency was rare in deals awarded by governments. Problems arose when administrations changed. "Projects that get into trouble are often ones where the bidding has not been transparent," said Vinayak Chatterjee, head of the infrastructure firm Feedback Ventures.
Besides the expressway linking technology hub Bangalore and Mysore, the project covering 20,193 acres envisaged construction of five townships along the road. It aimed to halve travel time between the cities from three-and-a-half hours.
The project would help Mysore and other cities en route develop into alternative destinations for firms complaining of traffic snarls, shortgages of housing, power and water and the high costs of Bangalore, a city designed for 200,000 people that now houses seven million.
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The entire project would cost over four billion dollars, said Kheny, who initiated it when India did not even have laws in place for private businessmen to build public works. NICE has so far built just four kilometres of the main expressway, said company spokesman Manjunath Nayaker.
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One resort owner who does not want to sell up has built a brick wall across the expressway, requiring motorists driving towards Mysore to take a detour along a mudtrack, said Nayaker. But Kheny said he has not given up. "Success or failure isn't up to me," he said. "I would love to make a lot of money but I will be satisfied with just making a difference."
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