DIBRUGARH, Aug 17 - With Spanish firm Isolux Corvium doing nothing more than having a ritualistic site office at Jorhat, work on the Jorhat-Jhanji-Demow four-lane highway has suffered immensely, with not an inch of road being built since the issue of work order in October last year.
The Spanish company is reported to have offloaded the work to a Manipur-based company called Mangang Construction. It is surprising that an international firm like Isolux has chosen a lesser known subcontractor like Mangang Construction. The result is that Assam�s vital highway work is suffering.
According to engineers at the PWD (National Highway) here, Isolux would be well advised to seriously devise strategies of speeding up the four-lane highway construction work. The company was allotted the two packages (Jorhat-Jhanji and Jhanji-Demow) of the four-lane highway works in October last year by the Union Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH). The newly formed NHIDCL (National Highways Infrastructure Development Corporation Limited), which is sponsored by MoRTH, is responsible for four-lane highway construction in Assam. The NHIDCL has a branch office in Guwahati.
While there is no work on the ground, the National Highway No. 37 between Jorhat and Dibrugarh has also deteriorated to a maze of pot-holes, as no maintenance work has been done on this stretch in the last 14 months. Given the heavy traffic on the highway, lack of maintenance has made things worse. The NHIDCL recently allocated repair works to two contractors for patching up the broken highway between Nagaon and Kaliabor, and Sivasagar and Dibrugarh.
