When you drive along a national highway, you would soon be able to check the real-time status of the highway across the country.

Deepak Kumar, Chairman of National Highways Authority of India (NHAI), who launched a new multilingual website of the organisation on Tuesday, said within two months, it would be possible for the general public to rate national highways through this website.

A project monitoring information system (PMIS) mobile App that will facilitate close, in-house monitoring of NHAI projects on a mobile phone was also launched, an official release said.

Kumar said NHAI also planned to soon launch a public interface of the PMIS desktop and App versions so that the public can view the real-time status of any project across the highway network.

To ensure timely delivery of its projects, NHAI is digitally monitoring them through the PMIS, which has been developed in-house along with The Boston Consulting Group.

Monitoring tool

“For project directors, the App is a project monitoring tool. They can visit a site, check into the App from there — the App will capture their geo-location — then they can take three pictures and upload them. This will also ensure that the actual physical progress of a site can be seen. The kilometre completed also can be seen from the App,” Akhilesh Srivastava, Chief General Manager (IT and Highway Operations), NHAI, told BusinessLine .

PMIS has a comprehensive database with over 180 data fields being tracked for each project, and a further 500 fields specifically for complex PPP projects, covering all key progress metrics such as design, contracting, construction, land acquisition, compensation disbursement, toll and traffic information and concession, contract information.

An in-built algorithm automatically highlights focus projects with key pending issues so that focused interventions for these projects can be discussed during these reviews.

The PMIS has enabled significant progress, with a 32 per cent increase in construction in 2016-17 over the previous year, and with over 60 per cent of the projects identified in 2016 with issues, now getting back on track, the release added.

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