NHAI to bid out 30,000 km highway projects in three years: Chairman

Highways regulator NHAI is looking to bid out 30,000 km of projects in the next 2-3 years which include several greenfield projects like Delhi-Jaipur, Hyderabad-Bengaluru and Delhi-Jammu, its Chief Raghav Chandra said on Tuesday.

"We intend bidding out about 30,000 km of road projects over the next 2-3 years," the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) Chairman said.

These include a number of greenfield projects like Delhi-Jaipur, Lucknow-Kanpur, Hyderabad-Bengaluru and Delhi-Jammu, Chandra said on the sidelines of National Roads & Highways summit here.

"Vadodara-Mumbai Expressway is on the anvil and the bid should be floated anytime. It is a 250-km stretch from Vadodara to Kim. This would be on BOT (build, operate and transfer) basis," Chandra said.

Most of the expressways are designed as greenfield projects which will be access controlled, the NHAI chief said and added, "We have already commissioned work on the Eastern Peripheral Expressway, which is 135 km long and 12,000 truckloads of earth is being taken there which we intend to take to 20,000 truckloads or 2 lakh tonnes."

He said that the government planned landscaping of the highway besides fitting it with the most advanced traffic management system, electronic tolling etc.

"We are hopeful of completing it by September 2017, clearly about 10 months before the deadline fixed by the Supreme Court to de-congest Delhi," the NHAI Chairman said.

He also said that Chenani-Nashri tunnel, the 9-km tunnel considered to be India's longest, should be ready by September and cut down travel time between Jammu and Srinagar by 4.5 to 5 hours.

Chandra also said that NHAI would complete the process of bidding out roads and highways worth 10,000 km by the end of current fiscal while 12,000-15,000 kms of such projects are likely to be physically completed in the next three years.

"The NHAI is moving faster to bid out roads and highways projects to establish suitable and perfect national connectivity and it is to achieve the intended purpose with prescribed time limit. In the current fiscal alone, 10,000 km of roads and national highways projects will be awarded for physical construction," he said.

On the electronic toll plazas, he said, "Most of our toll plazas, barring 20 out of the 363, are equipped with the electronic toll facilities. Even for the ones that we left out, we have hand-held devices. We are hopeful that by end of March next year, we should have ensured that about 2 lakh vehicles should have RFID tags on them."

Anand Kumar, Managing Director, National Highways & Infrastructure Development corporation (NHIDCL), emphasised that his corporation is trying its best to involve local contractors in laying roads and highways connectivity in the northern eastern part of the country equipping them with skills and capacity building training.