Chennai-Bengaluru Expressway: Modi government accelerates highway development in India further! In her Union Budget speech, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced that work on the Chennai-Bengaluru expressway will start soon. As part of the Narendra Modi government’s ambitious plan of building a network of “world-class expressways”, the Chennai- Bengaluru Expressway worth Rs 20,000 crore will be built. The Chennai-Bengaluru expressway will be 262 km long.
Chennai-Bengaluru expressway is a green-field alignment project with a proposed closed toll system. There are two roads that presently connect the capitals of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. One is through Hoskote (Bangalore)-AP then to Chennai and the second is through Electronic City (Bangalore) Hosur in Tamil Nadu and then to Chennai. The alignment of the proposed Chennai-Bengaluru expressway will be passing in between these two connecting roads. The processes of getting environment clearances and other pre-construction activities have been initiated and are under progress. The land acquisition for the Chennai-Bengaluru Expressway has been completed.
In 2017, the projected cost of the Chennai- Bengaluru Expressway was Rs 20,000 crore. The Chennai-Bengaluru expressway is expected to boost industrialisation and development activities in the surrounding areas.
Apart from the Chennai-Bengaluru expressway, Budget 2020 has provisions to expedite the construction of 2500 kilometres of access control highways, 2000 km of strategic highways, and 9,000 km of economic corridors across India. The India Budget 2020 also mentioned monetising at least 12 lots of highway bundles of over 6000 km ahead of 2024. It has stated that Delhi- Mumbai expressway will be completed by 2023.
Ahead of Budget 2020, in January, Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari’s had reviewed all on-going projects of the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) or Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH). These projects worth Rs 3 lakh crore. The review process was done in order to fast track highway projects across India. Gadkari said that his ministry had big plans to expedite the land acquisition process to build a network of highways and expressways.
