Highway Ministry to try new technologies in road construction

To encourage adoption of new materials and technology in road construction, the Highway Ministry has formulated a policy where new technology can be adopted through pilot projects.

To try the new technology, the incremental cost of adopting the new technology as against the tried and tested methods will have to be borne by the technology promoter.

Each technology will be adopted over a few kilometre, and the results will be tested and documented over the next few years.

Serious players VL Patankar, Director General – Roads, Highway Ministry, said this. “We hope that even if we adopt 20 technologies on a pilot basis and, say, 10 of them emerge as alternative options, that should be good enough,” he said.

Patankar, however, cautioned that the Ministry was looking for serious players who were willing to be partners and stakeholders in such projects rather than fly-by-night operators. “If something has been proven good in, say, Europe, it does not mean that the same technology will be good for India,” he added.

Many of these new materials or technologies are accredited by the Indian Roads Congress, but implementing agencies still hesitate in trying these out.

“In the Government sector, there is a fear about adopting new technologies for road construction because if the technology fails, then the official who decided to adopt its may be questioned,” Patankar said.

He said even in public-private partnership projects, where the private developer has the flexibility to design and adopt new technologies, we are not seeing much action.