Adani Road Transport has emerged as the highest bidder for the latest set of highway assets of National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) that have been offered for monetisation through Toll Operate Transfer (ToT) mode.
The company has placed a bid of Rs 1,692 crore for the road stretches that have been bundled together and offered under ToT. This is the 15 bundle that is being monetised through the ToT model where in lieu of an upfront payment the successful bidder or concessionaire gets the right to collect toll for 20 years.
If the bid is accepted then it will be NHAI’s second monetisation this financial year. In September last year it completed the process of monetisation of road assets under ToT 16 which brought in Rs 6661 crore. The highways in this bundle included two stretches on Hyderabad-Nagpur corridor in Telangana.have a total length of 251 km.
The other three companies in the fray for the highways in ToT Bundle 15 were IRB Infrastructure, Epic Concesiones backed by Edelweiss Alternatives and Prakash Asphalting and Toll Highways (PATH).
The 124 km of highways are on offer in ToT Bundle 15. The four lane highway starts from Trichy to Madurai and Tovrankurichi in Tamil Nadu.
In FY 2023-24, NHAI awarded Four TOT bundles worth Rs. 15,968 crores against the monetization target of Rs.10,000 crores for that fiscal through the mode.
NHAI’s monetisation plan is an alternate financing strategy as the agency has been barred from the debt market since 2022-23. Through better management the agency has been able to bring down its outstanding debt from Rs 3.48 trillion by the end of 2022 to Rs 3.35 trillion by the end of FY24. This year apart from regular debt servicing the NHAI has repaid debt of around Rs 56,000 crore this year.
In line with the National Monetisation Plan, NHAI’s Total Asset Monetization Program has crossed Rs 1 trillion which includes Rs 48,995 Crore through TOT, Rs. 25,900 Crore through InvIT and Rs. 42,000 Crore through Securitization. Bids for highways in ToT bundles 17, 18 and 19 are still open.
This year the highway builder expects to raise Rs 54.000 crore from monetisation of operational roads, which is much higher than Rs 40,227 achieved last year. Of the FY 25 target, Rs 8,000 will come from project based financing and Rs 46,000 crore from ToT and National Highways Infra Trust (NHIT).
The highway builder has identified 33 highway stretches of 2741 km that will be offered in the monetisation drive. Of the 33 highways, 12 have been offered to NHIT which is promoted by NHAI. Monetisation through NHAI is expected to bring in Rs 15,000 to Rs 20,000 crore. The remaining 21 will be monetised through ToT.
