Bihar Signs Away Its Silt to the National Highway Budget

"There will be no royalty. We will give silt to the NHAI free of cost for road construction," Nitin Gadkari said in New Delhi on Monday.

The memorandum he signed with the Bihar government allows MoRTH to dredge the state's rivers and route the recovered sand, silt and sediment into national highway projects. Gadkari said NHAI would do the dredging "without any cost to the Bihar government". What was signed is a procurement channel. The water resources department gets rivers cleaned; the road programme gets aggregate with no royalty attached.

Nitin Gadkari

Gadkari's interest is material supply. Sand and borrow earth are the recurring cost of highway construction and the recurring source of clearance trouble. He put nearly ₹5-lakh worth of projects in Bihar as ongoing or in the pipeline. Water conservation is the frame he chose, with Vidarbha, 10,000 farmer suicides and 25 years of work cited in the same breath. The river gains depth. The highway programme gains a quarry that pays nothing.

Samrat Chaudhary

The chief minister's interest is the flood bill. He told Gadkari the state loses "₹10,000 on an average every year due to flood". The report does not say whether the unit is crore or lakh, and the ambiguity travelled with the quote.

Chaudhary blamed water coming from Nepal for the damage, then supplied the mechanism. Bihar ran a 32% rain deficit this year. The highest flood level still reached its highest recorded mark on three major rivers. Short rain, record water: he read that as silt filling the channel, and the September 2026 Bihar Water Resources Restoration and Sediment Management Policy gives his government the legal route to extract it from rivers, barrages and reservoirs. Monday's MoU supplies the offtake.

NHAI

NHAI executes and carries the risk, and its contracts are measured in pavement, culverts and lane-kilometres. Nothing reported from the signing fixes a dredged tonnage, a river-wise target, a schedule, or a check that channel depth rose afterwards. The report calls ad-hoc dredging a long-term ecological danger and the state framework "rigorous, data-driven", then publishes no number from it.

Desilting now sits inside a road contract. Coarse, contaminated or wrongly located sediment gets rejected by the buyer, and the river keeps its load.

Bihar's exposure is annual: floods damage livestock, crops and infrastructure worth thousands of crores, per the report. The Kosi, the Gandak and the Bagmati keep feeding the Ganga. The Nitish Samvad campaign has been pressing Bihar's claim on Ganga water under the Indo-Bangladesh treaty, which expires next month.