NHAI awards projects worth Rs 10,912 cr

The National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) today awarded five projects, worth Rs 10,912 crore, of six-laning of highways under the National Highway Development Programme Phase-V (NHDP-V) to infrastructure developers, including Larsen & Toubro, Emirates Trading, IRB, Isolux Corsan, and Soma Enterprises among others.

These 882 kilometres of sections for six-laning of highways are under the Golden Quadrilateral (GQ) and North-South Corridor. Under the NHDP-V, 6,500 km of existing four-laned national highways (NHs) have to converted into six-lane highways through a build-operate-transfer (BoT) basis. Of the total length, 5,700 km is on GQ and 800 km on other sections.

The five awarded projects include 43.4 km on the Chennai-Tada stretch on NH-5, 225.6 km on the Gurgaon-Kotputli-Jaipur stretch on NH-8, 239 km on the Surat-Dahisar stretch on NH-8, 291 km on the Panipat-Jalandhar stretch on NH-1.

These are the first batch of projects which have been awarded on a new model concession agreement (MCA) approved by the Committee of Infrastructure recently.

The new agreement will work on revenue-sharing model where the private developers with share 17-48 per cent of their toll-revenue with the NHAI within 180 days of signing the agreement.

Under the old agreement, the NHAI projects were awarded on the bidding parameter of positive or negative grants.

Explaining the new agreement, a senior NHAI official said: "For the Delhi-Jaipur section, the NHAI's share of the toll revenue will be 48 per cent while it will be 38 per cent for the Surat-Dahisar project. These shares have been worked out on the basis of the potential of toll-revenue collections of each of the five projects."