This new `national highway development project' was announced by secretary in the PMO N K Singh and surface transport minister M Thambi Durai after a meeting of the taskforce on infrastructure on Wednesday.

Thambi Durai also said that the government was considering putting a cess on consumption of diesel, similar to the one currently put on petrol, to fund this highway. He added: "Our ministry has insisted that the funds got this way must be used only for the development of roads, perhaps through a dedicated fund."

This runs contrary to the normal practice where allcesses are routed to the Consolidated Fund of India and are then cleared by the finance ministry depending on its spending priorities.

The one rupee cess on petrol, announced in the budget this year, and earmarked for the National Highways Authority, for example, has still not been allocated to it by the finance ministry. Thambi Durai said that apart from government financing, private participation was also expected for the proposed network. He pointed out that the government has also finalised the bid document for attracting private participation in the project.

He said that the surface transport ministry had also sent a proposal for creation of "national expressway authority" for consideration of the cabinet. Singh said that the new merged proposal of highways will cost anywhere between Rs 36,000 crore and Rs 38,000 crore and will be completed within seven years. He said that the original golden quadrilateral work was estimated to have cost around Rs 20,000 crore.

This new project, according toexperts in the ministry of surface transport, will make the new proposed highway network a lot more economical than the one proposed by the prime minister at his FICCI meeting in October.

The existing proposal to multi-lane the existing highways connecting the country's four metros -- two-lane highways are to be four-laned and four-lane ones are to be six-laned -- is referred to as the golden quadrilateral programme. Apart from Singh and Thambi Durai, the task force meeting was attended by Jaswant Singh, Ananth Kumar, Montek Singh Ahluwalia and D V Gupta, among others.