After 16 years and Rs 9.21 crore in officially classified 'unfruitful expenditure,' Nagaland has discovered that the road connecting Peren to the highway is technically NHIDCL's responsibility — a clarification that could not apparently have been established before the money was spent.
In March 2009, the Ministry of Urban Development approved an 18.85 km road from Peren district to National Highway 39 at Chumoukedima and assigned it to Nagaland's Urban Development Department, which divided the project into three tidy packages. By 2026, all three packages remained incomplete, and the Public Accounts Committee's 146th Report confirmed Rs 9.21 crore had been spent reaching this outcome. The department then proposed a further Rs 18.17 crore to finish the job — before adding, in the same breath, that it 'might not be advisable to proceed' since NHIDCL would eventually take over the road anyway. The PAC formally classified the spending as 'unfruitful expenditure.' In road-building arithmetic: ministry approved it, state funded it, nobody built it, and a national agency will someday rescue it — but only after 16 years of construction funding produced no construction.