The Minister lamented that such news does not find any audience or is published anywhere. Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari said he built the Mumbai-Pune Expressway 27 years ago and boasted that till date the road remains in excellent condition.
Nitin Gadkari lamented that even if the road belonging to a state caves in, he is the one who is criticised on social media.
To this day, not a single pothole has appeared on it; the road remains in excellent condition, yet news about this never gets published,” Gadkari said addressing the Festival of Thinkers lecture series on Monday. “During my tenure, the Forest Department did not grant permission, so I could not construct the ‘missing link’ road. The state government has now built that missing link road. “Social media is proving useful for quality control. Underlining the importance of infrastructure, Gadkari invoked former US president John F Kennedy to stress upon the importance of roads.
“I built the Mumbai-Pune Expressway 27 years ago.
The Minister said even if the road belonging to a state caves in, he is the one who is criticised on social media, hinting at the controversy around the ‘Missing Link’ project in Maharashtra. When issues arose with it, I was targeted on social media, even though the project was executed by the Maharashtra government,” Gadkari said. Gadkari said social media also acts as a quality control agent. It allows for the immediate identification of where things have gone wrong,” Gadkari said. Drawing a comparison with the construction of the Konkan Railway, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis rejected criticism of the ‘Missing Link’ project and said the government would implement additional safety measures suggested by experts while asserting that the engineering achievement should not be judged by a single incident.
