NH-29 Kohima-Jessami: RIPPL Buys 16 Months, Not Progress

Scheduled completion and revised deadline

The scheduled completion date was January 4, 2026.

Ratna Infrastructure Project Private Limited says substantial work on NH-29 Package-II, Chakhabama to Kikruma, will restart only after November 15, 2026.

NHIDCL has revised the finish line to May 15, 2027 — sixteen months beyond a term that opened with a January 5, 2024 award.

Dr. MSN Murthy, RIPPL's authorised project signatory, travelled from Hyderabad to the company's base camp at Kikruma to give that date in person.

A signatory does not leave headquarters to face a community committee unless local escalation risk has overtaken schedule risk.

The recorded causes point to working capital

The recorded causes are not terrain.

JAC convenor Vivolie Kezo cited:

- Fuel shortages
- Delayed staff salaries
- Thin plant at the working sites
- Thin materials at the working sites

Fuel arrears and unpaid wages point at working capital, and they surface months before a contractor's balance sheet does.

Read the sequencing. RIPPL maintains that the practical difficulties and issues concerning the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways have been resolved.

If weather or right of way had been the binding constraint, a 24-month hill package would still have logged measurable progress across two working seasons. Instead the contract reached its completion date with re-mobilisation months away.

Extension of time and live exposures

An extension of time protects the authority's schedule narrative and the contractor's liquidated damages exposure at once. It says nothing about cash.

RIPPL absorbs the financing cost of a stalled site — idle plant, escalation against a fixed price — and carries the quality allegations Kezo has placed on record, that the works do not conform to tender specification.

Two exposures are live.

For NHIDCL, Chakhabama-Kikruma sits inside a widening pattern of revised completion dates across the Northeast frontier, where social licence behaves like a schedule item and district committees function as the only active site monitor.

For contractors pricing NHIDCL hill packages in Nagaland, payment cycle assumptions and mobilisation capacity deserve harder scrutiny than the bill of quantities.

What to watch

Watch November 15. If plant does not move then, May 2027 is an estimate rather than a deadline — and the JAC has already named who it will hold responsible.