NHAI joins hands with DCI to meet sand shortage for highway construction

Dredging Corporation of India (DCI) and National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) have signed Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to facilitate supply of sand for highway construction work coming up in the next few years.

“Concessionaires working on highways projects have been facing a shortage of sand at many sites. The MoU aims to fill this gap by facilitating the availability of sand for these concessionaires,” read an announcement by Ministry of Shipping.

DCI intends to do dredging operations at locations in South East Asia to procure sand, generating large volumes of sand for this purpose as well as to supply to others.

As per the MoU inked, business intermediaries will ship and store this sand at various ports in India and market it in India. Coordinating with DCI, NHAI will facilitate the process by displaying the availability of sand at various stockyards at the ports.

Already, the NHAI has invited bids for projects of 4,900 km till November, 2017, while bids for another 3,500 km are likely to be invited by December end, taking the total upto 8400 km.

More projects to be put for bidding in the months of January to March 2018 will be identified during December’s last week.

Projects costing Rs. 22,100 crore and covering 1,170 km have already been awarded so far. NHAI is making efforts to achieve its target of awarding 10,000 km during 2017-18