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Construction of a less than nine kilometre road through the Pench reserve forest has got held up for the last one year between the environment ministry and the road and highways ministry, with both only writing innumerable letters to each other. The delay in beginning construction, typical of the problem afflicting the infrastructure sector in India, will be sorted out by the government soon.Deputy chairman of the Planning Commission, Montek Singh Ahluwalai said all such disputes will now travel straight to the cabinet committee on infrastructure. "If there are issues hampering the performance of the sectors, we are going to take them up at the level of Cabinet Committee on infrastructure instead of discussing them at the inter-ministerial level, which reaches nowhere. The committee will take a political view and will take a decision. This is the first time initiative," he said.The government has taken this radical decision to stick to its plan to pump $1 trillion into roads, ports, oil and gas and other such sectors in the next five year plan, beginning from April 2012. Also as most infrastructure sectors as of now fail to meet targets, the government has decided to review performance of each ministry concerned, every quarter. This will ensure that corrective measures are taken in time to enable the government reach the five-year target of infrastructure development.The direction to review the performance on quarterly basis has come from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh ahead of the United Progressive Alliance-II government completing its first year in office at the end of this month. The government has already planned a Rs 50,000-crore fund to finance core sector projects."In view of the importance that we attach to infrastructure, the Prime Minister has given directions that Planning Commission should talk to the ministries more frequently to ascertain their performance vis-à-vis targets, which have now been broken down into quarterly targets," Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia told reporters. The Prime Minister is also the chairman of the plan panel.It will be implemented for five sectors to start with—power, road and highways, ports, civil aviation and railways, where there will be fixed quarterly targets for them (see table). "We are not including sectors like telecom that have performed well. By focusing on weak sectors, we will be able to achieve faster growth and, I hope, faster implementation of projects," Planning Commission member B K Chaturvedi said.Sector watchers said quarterly review of infrastructure projects will help in reaching close to the plan targets, provided that quick remedial actions. "It will certainly provide timely feedback but fast action is equally important to implement the projects," project financier IDFC Projects' vice-chairman and managing director Pradeep Singh told FE.The country has failed to achieve the physical targets for most infrastructure development. In the tenth plan period, India could add only 21,000 mw to its power generation capacity against the target of 42,000 MW. In the current plan too, the government expects the capacity to fall short of the 78,000 mw target by 20%. Case of ports and roads is no different with delays in land acquisition, environmental clearances and restricted availability of funds.Hopefully this will make the Pench project move faster on the ground.
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