Zoom to Delhi on road

Travelling to Delhi will become smoother and faster. On Friday, work began on the six-laning project on National Highway-8 connecting Dahisar to Surat in Gujarat. The Rs2,835-crore project is scheduled to be completed by April 2011.

Last year, the National Highways Authority of India awarded this project to the IRB-Deutsche Bank consortium under their plan to convert most of the existing four-lane highways on the Golden Quadrilateral into six lanes to accommodate the high volume of freight traffic. The agreement was signed with the concessionaire IRB Surat-Dahisar Tollways Pvt. Ltd.

The completion of financial closure for the project gives the company a continuous stretch of 415 km of highways from Pune to Bharuch via Mumbai, Vapi and Surat, through its projects: Mumbai-Pune Build Operate Transfer (BOT) (NH-4 of 111 km), Dahisar-Surat BOT (NH-8 of 239 km) and Surat-Baruch BOT (NH-8 of 65 km).
“This translates into 7% of the Golden Quadrilateral coming under IRB’s management, the largest holding under any single developer,” said VD Mhaiskar, chairman of IRB Infrastructure Developers Ltd.
NH-8 (now 4-laned) passes through Haryana, Rajasthan, Gujarat and Maharashtra covering about 1,400 km connecting Delhi to Mumbai.