Now border infrastructure development within hundred kilometre of the fence with China and Pakistan will pick up pace and cost less since ‘The Forest Conservation (Amendment) Bill’ passed by parliament last Wednesday has exempted the mandatory environment clearance required for projects and roads of national and strategic importance.

Normally the road project sanctioning process would take at least a year-and-half just to seek environment clearance. But, The Forest Conservation (Amendment) Bill has come as a “boon” for building the road network within the 100 kilometre of Line of Actual Control (LAC), Line of Control (LoC) and International Border with China and Pakistan respectively, Director-General Border Roads Lt General Rajeev Chaudhry told businessine.

“So all this forest process used to take at least one-and-a-half to two years for any road for that matter and the process in some cases used to go to three or four years due to some local bodies or the people of that place used to resist any development of the roads. This (Bill) has really come as a big advantage to BRO, now the roads can be started immediately after the sanction,” Lt General Chaudhry said.

Roadblocks

As of now 39 road projects spread across 1,545 km are stuck for want of environment clearance, the BRO Director-General said while appreciating that the amendment to the Act will enable timely completion of projects giving boost to defence preparedness as also usher in socio-economic development of the border regions.

It will also help infrastructure development in Left Wing Extremism (LWE) affected districts like in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand.

“The cost of the roads will go also come down because in the two years of span of forest clearance the cost used to escalate now that will not happen,” Chaudhry said.

Tedious process

According to the Director-General Chaudhry, the amended Act is going to be a “major game changer” for his Organisation as the Bill also talks about the fact that “some small detachments of security forces or the people of BRO working in 10 hectares of land will not need any clearance”.

As per the existing lengthy process, an organisation has to identify the alignment of the road and take the representatives of the state for a joint survey of that alignment wherever the forest land lies and trees have to be uprooted. All that takes a lot of time, since the revenue department officials prepare summary which is submitted to the state administration. They meet maybe once sometime in six months or a year to verify documents and give their verdict.

If cleared, the project comes to the Central government and again a committee scrutinises all those documents and gives the final approval winding up the whole process which is time consuming. In case of some deficiency of documents or adverse observation, the project file goes back to the state and again to revisit the complex regulatory process.

Lt General Chaudhry said that the the road construction is taking place at phenomenal pace despite the fact that the BRO employees work in inhospitable conditions and, many a times, the labour hours available is much less than 365 days due to bad weather and excessive snowing.

“The pace of road construction has gone from 600 km per year to nearly 900 km per year and in fact this is average of last nine years. If I talk about the last year itself it was 126 km what we completed and this year it should be 1,400 km of road which is huge,” Chaudhry emphasised. Apart from this, today the BRO has completed five tunnels but in the last 63 years only one tunnel was made and we working on ten more, he shared of the development work that also included preparing air strips at higher reaches close to LAC in northern borders.

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW