The road transport and highways ministry will construct 14 new expressways and high-speed corridors totalling 2,279 km with an investment of Rs 1.3 lakh crore. These projects will be spread across states including Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, West Bengal, Assam, Odisha, Kerala, Gujarat, Raipur, Bihar, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Assam and Jharkhand.
Sources said the ministry has sent the proposal for seven projects with estimated cost of around Rs 70,000 crore to other ministries for their feed back. Since each of these projects entails more than Rs 1,000 crore investment and will be developed under the public private participation (PPP), these need to get approval from a panel before these are placed before the Cabinet for getting the go ahead.
The development of Surat-Nasik-Ahmednagar-Solapur will be the longest stretch covering 599 km. Some of the other stretches include Kharagpur-Siliguri in West Bengal, Sanchor-Mehsana-Ahmedabad stretch passing through Rajasthan and Gujarat, Kanpur Bypass in UP, Kozhikode-Malappuram-Palakkad in Kerala, Raipur-Ranchi and Jorhaat-Badarpur corridor in Assam. The second longest stretch in the list is 346 km Coastal Road in Odisha, which has been in the planning for a long time.
The National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) has invited bids for some of the finalised stretches including a greenfield six-lane expressway connecting Agra with Gwalior.
Sources said the stretches have been finalised keeping in mind faster and seamless movement of heavy vehicles transporting goods, which will help reduce the transit time and logistics cost.
