Shipping and Road Transport Minister TR Baalu on Wednesday said states should give priority to important tourist destinations.
He also recommended proposals for upgradation of road projects with assistance from the Central Road Fund. Between 2000 and Sept 2005, the government approved 3,168 projects for the development of state roads. This involved an outgo of Rs 5,693 crore (Rs 56.93 billion) from the CRF, Baalu informed the consultative committee of Parliament.
During the first half of the current fiscal, 206 proposals which would amount to an outgo of Rs 656 crore (Rs 6.56 billion) had been approved for upgradation.
He praised states like Maharashtra, Gujarat, Punjab, Madhya Pradesh and Punjab, which have devised innovative financing models for road projects by setting up special purpose vehicles.
He, however, said that overloading continued to be a problem and it affected road quality. He said that a pilot project would be started immediately to install weigh-in-motion and static way-bridges on certain important roads carrying iron-ore, to check the menace.
Baalu said the government accorded top priority to increasing port capacity and their modernisation as traffic at the ports was expected to cross 1 billion tonnes by 2013-14, compared with around 400 million tonnes at present.