Reality of expressways in India: My first-hand experience with NHAI

These roads are nowhere near the requisite standards because everyone is ready to cut corners and save some cost.

BHPian NomadSK recently shared this with other enthusiasts.

Design of roads and workmanship of these roads is a simple sham in India. Let me give you a few real inputs as per the experience I had with the NHAI cost control and audit team for a very brief period.

This was around the time when the Golden Quadrilateral was in progress and the section was SMTP (Surat-Manor Tollway Project). The reason to set up this audit was that the construction cost was exponentially increasing. 3 major contractors, Dodsal, L&T, LG engg and SKEC were awarded the contract of a section of around 200 odd kms and they had sublet their work to local/cheap agencies. This project was funded by ADB.

The road section was 2 layers of GSB, 2 layers of WMM and 2 layers of DBM of various thicknesses. NHAI had instructed all its senior officials from the audit department to collect samples, check the quality of the surface, interview the personnel from the contractor's depart whether they have qualified people to do the job and also check the source of the material from where aggregates sand etc were procured. And find the root cause for the delay and the substandard quality of the work. All these results need to be sent to the respective project directors. There was a murmur about the road quality works and various complaints during that time.

Following were the resulting outcome

• Inexperienced people doing the roadwork jobs, technicians had limited knowledge of the work. Even the engineers deployed were inexperienced and lacked the expertise.
• Main contractors have sublet the work to various cheap agencies ready to do the work.
• Poor quality of construction material being supplied.
• QA/QC was almost non-existent. Field labs to be set up as per the contract were a showpiece, even some of the testing equipment wasn’t calibrated.
• Using cheap grade of bitumen.
• DBM mixes were consistently failing, data at the field labs was fudged and fabricated.
• Same mix design was utilized even when the source of material was changed.
• Retired NHAI officials were employed at these contractor companies. You get the gist.
• The structural section of the road was around 1m and when coring was done it was found to be very less. And Dodsal was blacklisted even after the re-work was carried out and there was a delay due to this.
• Local Mafia/politicos got the sublet projects in whatever section the work was going on.
• Black marketing of Bitumen as all refineries were not producing it and scarcity of it made private players come into the picture.
• Poor equipment used for compaction, PTR (Pneumatic) was almost non-existent. We saw a vibra roller being used for asphalt compaction and a grader used for spreading the DBM, a clear red flag, at that time even I didn’t know what was wrong with that, till the tech team elucidated me.
• Cost cutting and cutting corners, haphazard construction practices, not following the plan. I remember one culvert went off-centre by 1-2m and the whole section of road was required to change the alignment. This small bridge still exists near Billimoria.

There might be many more reasons, but this is what the technical report found out in 3/4 months with the Audit team.

End Result

We have so-called "Expressways", which are nowhere near the requisite standards because everyone is ready to cut corners and save some cost. In fact, they become more dangerous as speed goes up and with faulty design. Driving on them at design speeds is kind of a roller coaster ride, let's accept that. It's the design of the roads and the furniture around it which is the biggest safety hazard at the moment and I don't think we have to blame the cars for that.

There's a cost tag attached to Safety and Quality, unless we understand this we will always be penny wise and pound foolish.

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