BMIC work going on at a brisk pace

BMIC work going on at a brisk pace

The Hindu

`If Government hands over land, the entire stretch will be ready in three months'



BANGALORE: The completed nine-kilometre stretch of the Bangalore Mysore Infrastructure Corridor matches the standards of high-speed expressways anywhere in the world. However, non-stop high-speed connectivity along the entire 41-km Peripheral Road is still far away.

Land acquisition problems have adversely hit the four-lane Peripheral Road. The Government is yet to transfer more than 10 blocks of land to Nandi Infrastructure Corridor Enterprises Ltd. (NICE), which is building the Peripheral Road as part of the larger Bangalore-Mysore Infrastructure Corridor.

While the company spokesperson alleged that the Government was sitting on the files, Principal Secretary to the Government, Public Works Department, P.B. Mahishi, said efforts were on to fulfil the Government's obligations and commitments made to the Supreme Court.

The company spokesperson said it would open the entire stretch for traffic in less than three months if the Government handed over the land to it immediately. "But a series of small problems are creating big problems," he added. Due to non-availability of land, work could not be taken up on patches near Gottigere Lake, Kanakapura Road, Kengeri, Magadi Road and Tumkur Road among others, the spokesperson said.

Mr. Mahishi said a few patches of lands were with the Forest Department and a few others with the Lake Development Authority. He would write to the authorities concerned to expedite the matter. In certain other cases, the BMIC had identified land only recently and they were being acquired. The Government would need time to complete the procedures involved. As a rule, the Forests Department would have to be compensated with twice the area of land acquired from it. NICE was yet to comply with this requirement, Mr. Mahishi said.

But the company spokesperson said this had been complied with six months ago. He said he had the documents to prove this.

The Peripheral Road forms a major part of the Phase 1 of the bigger Bangalore-Mysore Infrastructure Corridor (BMIC). A part of it, from Mysore Road to Kanakapura Road (9 km), was inaugurated recently.

The first phase of BMIC has three components — the Peripheral Road, the 9.1-km link road to connect the city centre to the Peripheral Road and a 12-km stretch of the 111 km Expressway up to Mysore. The spokesperson said 90 per cent of road digging work and 65 per cent of road-laying work were complete.

Hosur Road-Mysore Road

On Monday, construction activity was going on briskly on the stretch from Hosur Road to Mysore Road. Labourers, surveyors and engineers were engaged in filling deep valleys at some places and cutting open rocky hillocks at others using excavators, earthmovers, lorries and battery-run search light vehicles (to enable work in the night).

The roads are being built on BOOT (Build-Own-Operate-Transfer) basis and will be handed over to the Government after 30 years. The roads are to be tolled at Re. 1 a km per passenger car unit (PCU). It may be noted that a motorcycle will be charged as half PCU, a car as 1 PCU, a lorry as 3 PCUs and a bus as five PCUs. The NICE spokesperson said the company had spent Rs. 850 crore of the expected expenditure of Rs. 1,350 crore on the first phase. This included the cost towards land acquisition but excluded the development of township that was to come up near Bidadi. NICE had been granted permission to build five townships along the expressway each with a population of one lakh to realise part of the expenditure incurred in building the roads, he added.