The national highways regulator NHAI plans to double its manpower strength to about 800

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in the next three months to achieve the transport ministry's ambitious target of building 35,000 km of roads in the next five years, a top official said.

"Faced with the challenge of building 20 km of road every day in the next five years, the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) is on a recruitment drive and plans to almost double its existing 400 employees strength by June," the official told PTI.

"We have already selected about 25 senior officials of the chief general manager and general manager ranks, besides 80 deputy general managers and 150 managers, as NHAI has been facing a severe manpower crunch," the official said.

The process for appointment of the remaining is on and would be completed soon, the official said, adding officials are drawn from various fields, including legal, financial and technical, besides being on deputation in view of the increasing number of road projects being awarded.

Soon after taking charge last year, transport minister Kamal Nath had set a target of constructing 20 km roads a day and envisaged awarding projects worth Rs 2 lakh crore by 2011.

The government has already decided to decentralise NHAI which earlier had only about 100 field offices, manned by junior level officers to oversee projects across the country. The move to decentralise work is aimed at speeding up the process and achieving the target of building roads at the pace of 20 km a day, the official said, stating NHAI is in the process of opening regional offices to be manned by chief general manager-level officials to award projects directly.

Besides it is also setting up about 150 special land acquisition units across the states which will address the problems like land acquisition and environment clearances in cooperation with the states concerned.

The ministry, had last month, said as many as 140 road projects out of 211 were delayed due to factors like problems in land acquisition. Earlier this month, road secretary Brahm Dutt said a total of 34 road projects were awarded in 2009-10 while 16 bids are under process and 31 are likely to be finalised soon.

"These together amounts to award of projects for building 7,800 km roads. We will award remaining projects soon to achieve the target of constructing about 12,000 km roads by June, as fixed by the ministry," Dutt had said.

The ministry had last year formulated a 'work plan' for 2009-10 and 2010-11, aiming to award projects for building about 12,000 km roads each year. However, later the ministry had revised deadline from March 31, 2010 to June 2010.