Bihar Government today accused Central Government for not paying the National Highway Maintenance Money due to which many Roads are in bad shape.
“The Central government has not allocated adequate funds to the state for repair and maintenance of the NH roads (3,734 km) in Bihar since 2006. It has not reimbursed the money despite repeated reminders,” Road Construction Minister Nandkishore Yadav said in the Assembly while replying to a debate on his department’s budget.
“It is because of the Centre’s apathy that the NH roads are lying in bad shape at several places in Bihar,” Yadav said, adding that the state was even ignored for the National Highway Development Project (NHDP)-6 as far as maintenance and repair of the NH roads was concerned.
The interests of Bihar in terms of road infrastructure have also been compromised under the Golden Quadrilateral project, East-West Corridor and NHDP-STAGE 3 in which the Centre reduced the four-laning target to only 552 km as against 1,015 km earlier, he said.
Yadav said the condition of road on NH-101 and NH-103 is so bad that the state government has written to the Centre seeking denotification of their national highway status so that the state could repair these roads with its own resources. Stating that the NDA government was committed to lay quality road infrastructure, he said that it has taken loan from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and built 2,750 km of road under state highways since 2006.