While the land acquired by the Uttar Pradesh Government along the Expressway has snowballed into a political slug fest, the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) still believes that is the way to go. The NHAI is planning to follow the Uttar Pradesh model for developing expressways.
Requesting anonymity a senior NHAI official said they were discussing the model, of offering longer concession periods and land pockets for real estate development along an expressway.
The Union Road Transport and Highways Ministry under Kamal Nath had proposed to build a huge network of expressways by 2022, also the final year of the 13th Five-Year Plan. However, the plan could not take off because of the paucity of funds. Hence the NHAI is mulling over this idea.
“As a matter of policy, we had decided to build expressways only through private participation. Building one km of expressways will cost around Rs.55 crore. It would require incentives to attract private participation,” said the official.
The UP Government has announced plans to build expressways across the state. Their developers get a longer concession period and pockets of land to develop townships. One such project, the Yamuna Expressway to connect Greater Noida to Agra, being built by the Jaypee Group, saw a lot of resistance from farmers on the terms of government acquisition. NHAI feels their projects would not see such resistance, as they’d allow the concessionaire to acquire land directly from the farmer.
“We have never faced any such resistance while acquiring land. These disputes are also political. We are planning to ask the private developers to acquire land from farmers directly, to avoid any kind of dispute at a later stage,” the official said. He said the concessionaire would also be allowed to decide on the alignment of the project, making their work easier.
The idea has not found much favour among highway developers. “This idea may look good on the paper but not on the ground. Land has become a sensitive issue and developers are facing problems even with Government backing. The investments in building expressways would be huge and one would not like to risk it,” said a Delhi-based developer who has suffered huge loss at the Noida Extension.
In the sixth phase of the National Highways Development Programme, NHAI had planned to build 1,000 km of expressways, and had identified a few stretches, including Vadodara-Mumbai, Delhi-Meerut, Kolkata-Dhanbad and Bangalore-Chennai.
The Government also wanted to form an expressway authority on the lines of NHAI but that plan did not proceed.
