NEW DELHI: What took days is now being done in a jiffy. NHAI’s home-grown AI-powered tool “Margsarthi” is enabling its more than 1,000 officers to detect discrepancies in contract documents, detailed project reports (DPRs) and minutes of meetings running into hundreds of pages within minutes, helping better decision-making.To add, the “gated garden” tool — which remains in its domain without wandering out in the open internet — is also flagging provisions that could potentially trigger disputes and litigation, and suggest corrective action.The tool, which has gone live, analyses defects, identifies faulty signage, synthesises learnings from previous arbitration and projects delays on the basis of NHAI’s voluminous repository of documents, officials said.NHAI chairman Santosh Kumar Yadav said, “We felt the need for this when carrying out a workflow study of project directors and regional officers last year we found that they have to be involved in a number of works, which can be easily done using AI tools. With this tool, now officials can check defects of a highway by just uploading a photo. The system will quickly run through hundreds of guidelines, codes, notification, specifications and give the result.”Officials said the tool can also alert officers about issues that need priority attention through personalised WhatsApp messages. Yadav said they are now considering giving access to the AI tool to consultants and contractors after ensuring that there are no loopholes for misuse of the highway authority’s information.Senior NHAI officials admitted that it was a pleasant surprise for them when they found the AI tool flagged how there were certain contradictory decisions or observations in the same projects and also discrepancies with regard to references in the same documents. “This is helping us in a big way and it is likely to reduce the risk of disputes and arbitrations in future projects when we use the tool to access a project report before bidding,” said an official.NHAI is one among the few govt entities that has a maximum number of contracts and disputes of over Rs 1 lakh crore.
