The Cabinet on Friday approved eight high-speed road corridor projects of length 936 km at a total cost of ₹50,655 crore — including one in Bengal.
The Kharagpur-Moregram corridor is a proposed 4-lane road, which will be 231km long developed in hybrid annuity mode (HAM) at a total cost of ₹10,247 crore.
The new corridor will supplement the existing 2-lane national highway and increase the traffic capacity by about 5 times between Kharagpur and Moregram, which is located in the Murshidabad district.
It will provide efficient connectivity for traffic between states such as Bengal, Odisha and Andhra Pradesh on one end and the north-eastern parts .
The corridor will enable reduction in travel time from existing nine to 10 hours to three to five hours for freight vehicles between Kharagpur and Moregram, thereby reducing logistics cost.
The implementation of these eight important projects will generate an estimated 4.42 crore mandays of direct and indirect employment, a government release said.
Besides the Bengal project, the other projects approved by the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs include 6-Lane Agra-Gwalior National High-Speed Corridor, 6-Lane Tharad-Deesa-Mehsana-Ahmedabad National High-Speed Corridor and 4-lane Ayodhya Ring Road.
On the new projects, Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a tweet on X said: “‘Tranformative’ boost to India’s infrastructure landscape!
According to the release, the 88 km Agra-Gwalior National High-Speed Corridor will be developed on build-operate- transfer (BOT) mode as a fully access-controlled six-lane corridor at a total capital cost of ₹4,613 crore.
The project will supplement the existing four-lane National Highway to increase the traffic capacity by more than two times in the Agra-Gwalior section of the North South Corridor (Srinagar-Kanyakumari), it said.
Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari on Thursday said his ministry will award road contracts worth ₹3 lakh crore within three months and close the current financial year with contracts worth ₹5 lakh crore.
The minister said NHAI’s present toll income is ₹45,000 crore and in the next two years, it will go up to ₹1.4 lakh crore.
