Revenue from toll operations to grow by 10-15% in FY18: MEP Infra
In an interview to CNBC-TV18, Jayant Mhaiskar, VC & MD of MEP Infrastructure spoke about the latest happenings in his company and sector. The company currently has an order book of close to Rs 4,000 crore of hybrid annuity projects to be executed over the next two-and-a-half years, he said. He expects the revenue topline to be around Rs 1,800-2,000 crore on a year-on-year (YoY) basis for the next two years. “The revenue on toll side would likely to grow steadily between 10 percent and 15 percent on YoY basis,” he further added. MEP Infra also plans to deleverage in the coming months with the help of the Infrastructure Investment Trust (InvIT), said Mhaiskar. Currently the company has total consolidated debt of around Rs 3,000 crore and is likely to transfer close to Rs 1,300-1,500 crore of debt to InvIT. Gary Sanchez Authentic Jersey
CM Khattar seeks Nitin Gadkari’s help to end Kherki Dhaula toll bottleneck
The Haryana government has approached the highways ministry to find solution to Kherki Dhaula toll plaza on Gurgaon Expressway, which has been a traffic bottleneck. Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar has sought Nitin Gadkari’s intervention to shift the toll plaza beyond Manesar. Sources said Khattar has raised how the toll plaza at Kherki Dhaula beyond Gurgaon has become a roadblock in investment flow to Manesar industrial area. He has suggested Gadkari to direct his ministry officials and executives of National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) to take up the issue with the present concessionaires of Gurgaon Expressway and Pink City Expressway, which are implementing the six-laning of highway between Gurgaon and Jaipur. For long, the Haryana government has been raising the need to do away with the toll plaza with NHAI and has even offered to pay a portion of the compensation that the highways authority would have to give to the present concessionaire. But NHAI has not accepted it. TOI has learnt that one of the options that the Centre may consider is shifting the toll plaza to Bilaspur, about 16 km away from the exiting toll plaza. But officials admitted that this will be a tricky issue since it involves two concessionaires. They added buying back the Gurgaon Expressway project is a huge loss-making proposition for NHAI. First, NHAI would have to hold talks with the existing concessionaire of Gugaon Expressway and then would have to hold negotiations with the Pink City Expressway concessionaire. Sources said since any move of buying back a highway stretch could amount to benefiting the loss-making concessionaires, NHAI would have to take proper safeguards. TOI had earlier reported that against the demand of Rs 2,000 crore to remove the toll plaza, Haryana’s industrial development agency, HSIIDC, had offered to pay Rs 600 crore. Removal of Kherki Dhaula toll plaza will benefit lakhs of commuters who travel to Manesar and those who plan to shift to Gurgaon’s news sectors, around Dwarka expressway and Southern Peripheral Road. The demand for doing away with the Kherki Dhaula plaza had started soon after NHAI and the former concessionaire of the expressway had struck a deal to end toll collection at Sirhaul border near Udyog Vihar. Toll rates for all types of vehicles have gone up since the first toll plaza was removed. There have been several protests by residents’ organisations and by industry associations against the existing toll plaza. As per the contract agreement, the present concessionaire is allowed to collect toll from all vehicles till 2023. John Miller Jersey
From tenement to township, India’s $1.3 trillion housing push
When he was little and his father was building his taxi business, Pradeep Yadav lived in a “chawl,” a rundown tenement in India’s financial capital, Mumbai. The apartment had one light, a fan and water for just two hours a day. Now he stands at the vanguard of a potential housing boom that brokerage CLSA India Pvt. estimates could reach $1.3 trillion in the next seven years. With their three boys finished university, the family bought a flat in Palava City, a leafy township on the edge of the metropolis. Outside their balcony, tidy footpaths wind their way past manicured gardens and a swimming pool glints in the summer heat. “It was his dream to have something bigger,” Yadav, says of his father, now retired. “He didn’t realize he would get something like this.” The Yadavs are part of a swelling middle class in India that’s demanding better housing and increasingly has the means to get it. It remains to be seen whether the country, with its sprawling slums at one end of the housing spectrum and obsession with luxury at the other, can fill the gap but analysts such as CLSA say conditions are ripe for a broad acceleration in residential construction in the $2 trillion economy. “The last decade was about price appreciation,” said Pankaj Kapoor, founder of Mumbai-based Liases Foras Real Estate Rating & Research Pvt. “This decade will be about volume growth.” Burgeoning Demand Indian real estate, historically a depository for black-market cash, was hit hard by the government’s move to stamp out corruption with a ban on high-denomination bank notes in November. The slump is showing signs of a recovery. Sales across nine cities rose 19 percent in the March quarter after a 20 percent slump in the previous three months, according to PropTiger.com, an Indian real estate advisory firm. The demographic arguments for rising home sales in India have been long building. About 69 percent of the country’s 1.3 billion people are in prime house-buying age — 20 to 40 years — more than any than any other nation, according to a Bloomberg Intelligence report in April. Per capita income has grown at a compound annual growth rate of 10 percent for the past five years, according to CLSA’s note in May. The Yadav family is a textbook example of this burgeoning demand. Migrating to Mumbai from the northeastern state of Uttar Pradesh, they raised three sons — Pradeep, 28, an MBA graduate, Birendra, a doctor and Pramod a gemologist. They eventually climbed the property ladder to a rented flat. About three years ago they bought the two-and-half-bedroom apartment in Palava City for about 7.7 million rupees ($116,000), where they all still live together. It’s the supply part of the equation that India’s had trouble with. The growing migration of people to urban areas has overwhelmed infrastructure, pushed up land costs, and led to housing shortages. Building costs have also risen in recent years and developers have concentrated on the luxury end where margins are fatter. Government funding has largely flowed to the rural sector. Tipping Point But two catalysts have come into play that have put construction at a “tipping point,” CLSA’s Mumbai-based analyst Mahesh Nandurkar and his colleagues wrote. Prime Minister Narendra Modi broadened reforms this year to foster construction and home buying under his “Housing for All” program, launched in June 2015. That aims to build 20 million urban homes and 30 million rural houses by 2022. Property has also become the most affordable in two decades. Among the reforms: builders of affordable housing received “infrastructure status,” making them eligible for state incentives, subsidies, tax benefits and institutional funding; interest-rate waivers and rebates were extended to households with incomes up to 1.8 million rupees and laws to tackle building delays and protect home buyers came into effect on May 1. Modi has tapped into the widespread view that as the economy boomed, the property market “became a haven for speculators and investors,” making it nearly impossible for middle class people to buy a modest home, said Ashok Malik, who heads the New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation’s neighborhood regional studies initiative. But “an uptick in the jobs market would be necessary for a fully-fledged middle class housing boom,” Malik said. “And that remains a risk.” Delayed Approvals Hurdles remain immense. There’s still “a big question mark” over whether the government’s housing plan is “realistic and implementable,” Anuj Puri, chairman of real-estate services at JLL Residential, wrote in a note released on June 5. “It seems impossible if enough land is not released for the creation of affordable housing. Land is a very price-sensitive commodity, and its current shortage in major city-centric areas prevents the development of affordable housing in areas where it is most direly needed.” Apart from costs, entrenched bureaucracy makes getting projects off the ground tedious. Once they do, more than 30 percent of projects run at least a year over schedule, according to Liases Foras. Economic Enabler Challenges aside, the government’s begun to view housing as an “economic enabler”, said Abhishek Lodha, 37, managing director of Lodha Group, which is building Palava City and is one of India’s biggest property developers. “The government has started recognizing that for the middle class to start creating wealth for themselves they have to participate in housing, just like any democracy,” Lodha, said in the company’s headquarters in Mumbai. “Property ownership plays a key role in the middle class growing their wealth over time without necessarily having to invest in speculative assets” such as stocks. Since the prime minister’s affordable housing incentives were announced, 113,508 homes have been completed and another 755,083 are in progress, said AA Rao, ministry of housing and urban poverty alleviation spokesman. “There is a palpable movement forward,” in private sector participation, he said. Lodha Group, best known for its luxury developments, has also been steadily building out Palava City on a 4,500-acre (1,821 hectare) tract of land — about a quarter of the size of metropolitan Mumbai.
Why NDA govt is pushing for road connectivity in Jammu and Kashmir
As part of its road connectivity programme for Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government has stepped up efforts to develop the transportation architecture for the state which has witnessed an unprecedented cycle of violence in recent years. These projects include developing roads totaling 683.31 km in length, with an investment of Rs10,204.45 crore, constructing the marquee 14-km-long Zojila tunnel and the 6.5-km Z-Morh tunnel on Srinagar-Kargil road. The increased pace of work by state-run National Highways and Infrastructure Development Corp. (NHIDCL) comes in the backdrop of China developing the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), part of its showpiece “One Belt One Road” (OBOR) infrastructure initiative. The importance of these projects can be gauged from their location. According to documents reviewed by Mint, these projects include four-laning of Jammu-Akhnoor section of National Highway (NH)144A, Punch-Uri road on a new alignment and Baramullah to Gulmarg section on NH 1A, which connects the Kashmir Valley to Jammu and the rest of India. Other road projects are in the Ramban, Doda, Kishtwar and Chatroo divisions of the state. Mint reported on 6 April about the NHIDCL being entrusted to build five tunnels worth Rs23,000 crore in Jammu and Kashmir with all-weather access by 2024. The other tunnels are Pir-Ki-Gali Tunnel on NH 244, Vailoo Tunnel at Sinthan Pass, and Daranga Tunnel at Shudh Mahadev. While NHIDCL managing director Anand Kumar declined to comment on India’s plan being tweaked in view of OBOR, he said that work was on at full speed for these projects in the state. Kumar added that NHIDCL will be playing a significant role in J&K connectivity through its tunnel network, with work on Zojila tunnel to be allotted this year. “The tunnel networks will provide all-weather connectivity and will be useful for movement of civilians and armed forces too,” Kumar said. India has expressed concerns over “sovereignty issues”, with the CPEC cutting through Gilgit and Baltistan areas of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK). India gave the OBOR conference a miss last month over Beijing’s insensitivity to India’s concerns. Another government official, requesting anonymity, said that these projects have a strategic intent given the state’s unique geographical position. OBOR, first unveiled by Chinese president Xi Jinping in 2013, aims to put billions of dollars in infrastructure projects, including railways, ports and power grids across Asia, Africa and Europe. India has been expediting the pace of infrastructure creation in the state with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in April inaugurating the country’s longest road tunnel—the 9-km-long ‘Chenani–Nashri Tunnel’, which links Jammu to Kashmir Valley. India accuses Pakistan of pushing in terrorists through the Line of Control (LoC) to foment terrorism in Indian-administered Kashmir—something Pakistan denies. New Delhi also says that Pakistan has been violating a 2003 ceasefire along the border to push terrorists under covering fire. Rod Smith Authentic Jersey
India to launch ‘NHAI International’
The government is planning to launch a dedicated international subsidiary of the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) to take up roads and highway projects abroad, particularly in South Asia. Simultaneously, India is also looking forward to setting up joint ventures (JVs) for road construction in neighbouring countries. Union Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari said his ministry was considering a proposal to launch “NHAI International” for undertaking roads and highway construction projects abroad. Experts say that such a subsidiary could be in the form of a special purpose vehicle (SPV) which will collaborate with foreign companies to bag international projects. The minister said India is keen to participate in road construction in neighbouring countries like Iran, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Sri Lanka through joint ventures. “We are promoting road construction joint ventures in Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka has already agreed to allot a couple of road projects in northern Sri Lanka to us,” Road Transport and Highways Minister Gadkari told IANS in an interview. “We have plans to develop road projects in Iran as part of the development of Chabahar Port-related projects.” On the domestic front, the minister has set his sights on achieving a target of construction of 40 km of roads per day in the next year or so. “If I could achieve 23 km per day from the rock bottom 2 km per day in three years, there is no reason I could not reach close to my next target of 40 km per day in the next one year or so,” Gadkari said. “Projects like road and highway construction, including tunnels, over-bridges and roadside amenities and other related projects also depends on various other factors like weather conditions and local issues.” As per various estimates, India has one of the longest road networks across the world at over five million kilometres. The network consists of national highways, state highways, major district roads and rural roads. Out of the total road network, national highways and expressways account for only two per cent, but are used to transport more than 40 per cent of all goods and passenger traffic. The slow average speeds on these highways due to high road density and non-availability of access-control measures allows cargo laden trucks to travel only 225-250 km per day. The overall target is to increase the national highways length to two lakh kilometres but delays in land acquisition and a famine of private investment has slowed down progress. For 2016-17, 23 km of roads were constructed per day, up from 16.6 km a day in 2015-16. In the Union Budget 2017-18, the central government allotted Rs 64,000 crore ($9.55 billion) to NHAI for roads and highways and Rs 27,000 crore ($4.03 billion) for the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY) that is focused on rural roads. However, road and highway construction did not gather pace automatically, as the minister recalled three years back there were 400 projects which were stuck due to problems relating to land acquisition, environment and forest clearances, and rail over bridges. “There was an atmosphere of gloom and disillusionment. Contractors were unwilling to continue with the projects and bank NPAs (non-performing assets) were piling up,” Gadkari said. “I encouraged all the stakeholders and organised face-to-face meetings with the state government officials, bank managers, NHAI officials and the contractors. “In the last three years we have collectively resolved most of the knotty issues, cleared road blocks and put the projects back on track. There is hardly any project which is stuck.” Reggie Lewis Womens Jersey
Highway construction target for Nitin Gadkari-led Road Transport Ministry: Is 30 km per day too much of a stretch?
Road transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari’s target of awarding 25,000 km and building 15,000 km of roads in the last fiscal may have been missed by a wide margin, but that hasn’t come in the way of what his ministry looks to accomplish ahead, with the targets remaining unchanged for the current fiscal. While there is a general view among experts that the targets are unrealistic, ministry officials consider going past the 30 km/day mark in the present fiscal (target is 41 km/day) doable. In April, the first month of FY18, highway construction logged 679 km, averaging 22.63 km/day, a tad higher than the 22.5 km clocked in the last fiscal. Significantly, April is considered the most conducive month for highway construction in India, with the onset of the monsoon slowing down the pace of work for a few months. Notwithstanding this, a top official in the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) sounded confident of construction breaching the 30-km/day mark in the current fiscal. “It is good to have a minister like Gadkari who publicly professes targets. If the construction figure touches 30-31 km/day, it will please me, as a citizen, to see that the country is moving in the right direction,” says Vinayak Chatterjee, Chairman, Feedback Infra. As against Gadkari’s target of building 15,000 km of highways in 2016-17, 8,231 km were constructed. The minister had attributed the wide miss — which yet remained the highest ever figure clocked by the ministry and the National Highway Authority of India — to problems in land acquisition and utility shifting, non-availability of aggregates, poor performance of contractors and delay in clearances. Having kept the target at the same level for the current fiscal, Gadkari is pushing his officials to get their act together. He has also stepped up the monitoring system, with problems faced by the implementing agencies being addressed expeditiously. Overall, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government has done considerably better than its predecessor United Progressive Alliance (UPA) on the road construction front. As against the average 5002 km of highways built in the last three years of the UPA regime (15,005 km in all), highway construction in the first three years of the NDA regime went up to 6,234 km/year, marking a 24% jump. When the Narendra Modi government took over in May, 2014, the construction rate stood at 11.67 km/day. Under the new regime, it grew to 12 km/day in 2014-15 and 16.6 km/day in 2015-16, touching a record 22.5 km/day in the last fiscal. On the award front too, the Modi-led government’s first three years have outpaced the previous government’s last three years in office. While the UPA-II government awarded work for 15,380 km of highways in its last three years, the figure shot up to 34,349 km for the 2014-17 period — 7.980 km in 2014-15, 10,098 km in 2015-16 and 16,271 km in 2016-17. The Union government has taken several steps to reverse the drying up of private investment in the sector. It eased the exit policy for developers to enable them to invest in new projects and introduced the hybrid annuity model wherein the Centre bears 40% of the project cost. As per the new rules, projects worth below Rs 500 crore are awarded by the highways secretary, those up to Rs 1,000 crore by the road transport and highways minister and only projects above that value need the approval of the Union Cabinet. It generally takes two to two and a half years for a developer to execute a highway project. Saku Koivu Authentic Jersey
Govt goes digital to speed up land acquisition for highway projects
The process of acquiring land for highway projects is set to get shorter by at least six months. The entire process will go digital eliminating chances of mistakes and reducing the long time taken for verification of land titles. The highways ministry has undertaken a massive exercise of hosting digital details of the land of more than 6.45 lakh revenue villages across 668 districts on a portal named “Bhoomiraashi” or compensation for land acquisition. This will be the one-point platform for online processing of land acquisition and notifications as well. Quicker land acquisitions will accelerate road construction, which is one of the main focus areas of the Narendra Modi government for pushing infrastructure development and creating jobs as well. The ministry has already held workshops with officials of Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh to sensitise them about the new scheme of things aimed at expediting the process. At present, the completion of land acquisition takes at least one-and-half years. Delay in land acquisition is the key reason for stuck highway projects across the country. NHAI, road transport ministry and its new wing NHIDCL, (which undertaking works in north-east and Jammu and Kashmir) are the biggest land procurers. Just NHAI on its own undertakes process to acquire 8,000-9,000 hectares of land annually for road development and releases around Rs 20,000 crore every year as compensation to land owners. The speed of acqusition is likely to increase as the government plans to roll out another mega highway development programme named Bharat Mala. Officials said under the new process there will be no physical movement of files from the local land acquisition officer up to the minister. Similarly, the notifications will be issued on digital mode. “Since the land records are available digitally, there is no need for verification by legal officials, which is a time taking process. Similarly, there will be no scope for mistakes during different stages of the notification. Correcting such mistakes delays the process,” a government official said. Sources said the online system will also have a feature of sending SMS alerts to the affected land owners about the updates. For that, they have to provide their numbers to the local land acquisition official. The system software will also enable direct transfer of the compensation to the beneficiaries’ accounts from all the agencies under highways ministry. Natrell Jamerson Jersey
On the road: A changing fortune, and Gadkari to the rescue
Nitin Gadkari might not have been a man of his word, but the goal-setting minister in charge of road transport, highways and shipping can take heart that he hasn’t shot too far off the mark, either. And in the ministry’s achievements, no less its missed targets, can be seen the broader narrative of infrastructure that is being rewritten under him. In only three years, the ministry has managed to drive private participation in the sector, adopt a more reasonable model for implementing projects – all this while shrugging off a media which has been nitpicking over Gadkari’s misses. To be sure, there have been a few of misses, as well. By December 2016 Gadkari’s ministry had awarded only 27 percent of the budgeted projects for FY16. Even construction target was 30 percent of the targeted number. By and large, Gadkari has been on the ball. According to a Crisil report, project awards in the roads sector have picked up thanks to the new hybrid annuity model (HAM) and engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) projects. Order book of 50 EPC-focused road developers grew two-fold from Rs 41,000 crore in FY14 to Rs 85,600 crore in FY17. In the current fiscal year, the order book is likely to touch Rs 1 lakh crore considering the expected Rs 48,000 crore worth of orders. Government’s strategy of moving away from the build-operate-transfer (BOT) model seems to be working. In 2013, all projects were under the BOT model but these have been reduced to just 20 percent by FY16 and in FY17 was only 10 percent. Road developers are enjoying their day under the sun with order book to sales at around 2.5 to 3 times the revenue as compared to 1.5 times revenue when the present government assumed office in 2014. There are a number of reasons why there has been an improvement in the overall performance of the ministry. A Kotak Securities report quoting a member of finance at NHAI (National Highways Authority of India) says that a focused attention to implementation and smoothening the process helped improve performance. Out of 73 stuck road projects at the start of the current government’s term, only nine are still languishing for varied reasons. The clearance processes were expedited by the creation of inter-ministerial committees and a periodic review directly by the PMO (Pragati programme). Rather than acquiring land after announcing the project, which resulted in time delays and cost escalation, NHAI now tenders new highways only after securing at least 90 percent of land along the corridor. In a rare display of team work between central and state government bureaucracy, the central government has roped in various states and their departments/bureaucrats to help NHAI handle the large volume of projects on the anvil. States like Maharashtra are helping to prepare a large number of DPRs (detailed project report) for NHAI. In order to incentivize private sector participation in roads, the government is clearing projects which are stuck in arbitration. In cases which are stuck in arbitration, the government has released 75 percent of the amount subject to bank guarantees even while hearings are on in higher courts. NHAI has processed all 53 of such arbitration cases and has released payments in seven of them. The rest of the payments will be released as soon as bank guarantees are furnished by the private parties. This move has helped build the confidence of private sector players who could not participate in bidding as a sizeable chunk of their money was locked up in arbitration. Moving to a hybrid-annuity model (HAM) where 40 percent of the construction cost is being funded by NHAI over the construction period through five milestone-based payments, private players are comfortable taking these projects on as are banks who feel comfortable with NHAI putting in a sizeable amount of money. However, the key to growth and implementation is the financing power of NHAI. Though the government has allocated Rs 64,000 crore for the ministry in the current fiscal, NHAI would need more resources to meet its borrowing plan of Rs 2.1 trillion over the next five years. An Rs 5,000-crore denominated Masala Bonds issue is lined up by the company but it would still need more resources to keep the sector moving. Further, with a new avenue in the form of Infrastructure Investment Trust (InvIT) NHAI can securitize its highway assets and raise funds for future growth. However, a parliamentary panel recently pulled up NHAI for failing to raise targeted funding. NHAI was given a target to raise Rs 59,279 crore during FY17 but it could raise only Rs 27,831 crore till January 2017.Looking at the performances of road developers and their order books which gives a better visibility, Crisil upgrades are now twice as many downgrades in FY16. This is a sharp improvement to one upgrade for every nine downgrades in FY14, thus reflecting the changing fortunes of road sector. Allen Robinson Jersey
Road EPC companies set for 15% topline growth in FY18: Crisil
The road ministry’s efforts to improve the financial health of road companies in the country have paid off. According to ratings agency Crisil, credit profile of road engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) companies have shown a sharp turnaround. The Crisil report added that these road EPC companies are set for 15% topline growth in current financial year. “Driven by the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) and the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI), over 80% of the highway projects in the past three years have been bid out under the hybrid – or engineering, procurement, construction (EPC) – model. Not surprisingly, 50 road EPC companies rated in the investment-grade by Crisil, have benefited from the trend and delivered 20% compounded annual growth in revenue in the past three years,” the report said. According to the report, better working capital management and capital structure, sharp focus on execution and judicious bidding has led to a significantly improved credit ratio, with the ratio of upgrades to downgrades in the sector improving to 2.0 in the last financial year, up from 0.11 in financial year 2015- 2016. The trend is expected to continue for current financial year. “Crisil-rated companies are expected to maintain their revenue growth momentum this financial year, fuelled by a strong order book of Rs 85,000 crore (as of FY17 end), and expected order-book-to-revenue ratio of three times this financial year, which provides good topline visibility,” said Sachin Gupta, Senior Director, Crisil Ratings. The combined order book of these 50 companies is likely to touch Rs one lakh crore this financial year, driven largely by increased government spending in the roads sector, the report said. However, the trend may hold true only for pure road EPC companies. ” In contrast, many large diversified EPC players are yet to wade out of the credit profile morass they entered in the past because of aggressive bidding, leveraged balance sheets, policy bottlenecks and a sluggish economy,” the Crisil report said. Crisil also expects the interest coverage ratio or (ICR) for road EPC companies to further improve. “Along with healthy revenue growth, Crisil-rated players have maintained a comfortable capital structure, with aggregate gearing of close to 0.5 times. And despite scaling up in business, what helped them control borrowings was efficient working capital management, lower capex, and policy support for build-operate-transfer projects. That has brought about a gradual improvement in key credit metrics such as interest coverage at four times in financial year-2016-2017, which is expected to rise to five times this financial year,” the report said. Linval Joseph Authentic Jersey
Delhi-Saharanpur highway: State recommends CBI investigation
The State government on Tuesday recommended a CBI investigation in allegations of embezzlement of around Rs 700 crore by a Hyderabad-based private firm that was awarded the contract to construct the Delhi-Saharanpur four-lane highway. Principal Secretary (Home), Arvind Kumar confirmed that the letter to Department of Personnel & Training (Ministry of Home Affairs) recommending CBI probe into the matter had been sent on May 16. Former Principal Secretary UP State Highway Authority (UPSHA) Navneet Sehgal told The Indian Express that the contract, worth Rs 2500 crore, was awarded to the firm in 2010 and work had started in 2011. However, the firm stopped work citing environment clearance and despite it being cleared later, the work wasn’t completed, added Sehgal. Upon inspection of the work that it did, he said, it was discovered that the firm had used only Rs 100 crore of the Rs 700 crore it had withdrawn from public and private banks against the state government project. Since it was a matter of misuse of public money, a CBI probe was recommended and forwarded to the then SP government in February this year, added Sehgal. A police case was also registered in Lucknow in this regard. UPSHA principal secretary Avanesh Awasthi, who took over from Sehgal, said, “After taking charge of the office, I came across the serious irregularities and recommended the CBI investigation to the government.” Andre Dawson Jersey