3 mega highway projects, 3 smaller ones cleared

The public private partnership appraisal committee under the finance ministry has cleared three mega highway projects that require an investment of around Rs2,500 crore apiece.

These are the Jabalpur-Bareilly-Rajmarg-Jabalpur circular highway running through Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, covering a distance of 290 km and requiring investment worth Rs2,445 crore; the Ahmedabad-Vadodara Expressway spanning 103 km and costing Rs2,381 crore; and, the Eastern Peripheral Expressway, from Kundli in UP, on the outskirts of New Delhi on National Highway I, passing through Baghpat in Haryana, bypassing Ghaziabad, Noida, Faridabad and terminating at Palwal in Haryana, covering 135 kms and costing Rs2,698 crore.

In all, the committee has approved eight projects worth Rs11,000 crore, spanning 907 km.

The other three projects cleared are the Beawer-Bhindwara highway in Rajasthan, the Nagpur-Wainganga Bridge highway in Maharashtra, the Walajahpet-Poonamallee highway in Tamil Nadu.

“The ministry will award these projects by end of the current fiscal. The request for participation process for these projects is over and parallel financial bidding is now on,” said a road transport and highways ministry official, not wishing to be named.

The Eastern Peripheral Expressway is being pursued by the ministry for the third time after being rejected twice in the last two years because there were only single bidders.

When the project was put on the block for the first time in 2008, Reliance Infrastructure had emerged as the sole bidder, leading to the scrapping of the process.

The government then restructured the project and put it again on the block in April 2009, with the same result — Reliance Infrastructure was the only bidder. Again, it was nixed.

The project, for which bidding process initiated in 2007, has seen cost escalation from Rs2,300 crore to Rs2,700 crore now.

This time around, however, incentives are in the offing for the project to generate investor interest.

Toll rates are likely to be capped and concession period increased to attract investors to take up the project.

Consultants preparing the detailed project report have been advised to study the feasibility, considering the concession period as 23.5 years, instead of the earlier 20 years.

Out of the total of 1,680 hectare of land required for the construction of the expressway, 92% has already been completed.