VIJAYAWADA: The Centre has agreed to upgrade the Vijayawada-Hyderabad national highway into a six-lane highway from the existing four lanes.
The National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) signed a deal with the existing road maintenance contractor, GMR Infra, to exit the project, nearly a year ahead of its term. Fresh tenders would be floated to take up the six-lane works.
NHAI held several rounds of discussions with GMR Infra which would be paid compensation for exiting the project.
Following the exit of GMR Infra, NHAI on Monday took over the management of all toll plazas on the Vijayawada-Hyderabad NH, and picked up two agencies as sub-contractors to manage the toll collections till the completion of the six-lane project.
Amaravati development likely to get a boost
Expansion of the national highway will be a game-changer for development along the highway, particularly in the wake of Amaravati being developed as the capital city of Andhra Pradesh.
The UPA govt had launched the widening project of NH between Vijayawada and Hyderabad to four lanes from the previous two lanes in 2010.
GMR Infra bagged the contract for 1,740 crore and signed a deal with NHAI to upgrade the 181km-long NH from Dandu Malkapuram village under Choutuppal mandal in erstwhile Nalgonda district to Nandigama in Krishna district of AP into four lanes. Barring a few patches where there were land acquisition issues, the agency completed the project by 2012 and launched toll collections at Pantangi and Korla Pahad in Telangana, and Chilakallu and Kesara in AP. GMR’s term for collection of tolls was scheduled to end in July 2025.
The NHAI, in fact, had acquired additional land keeping in mind future plans to widen the highway into six lanes while taking up the four-lane project in 2010 itself. As per the original MoU, GMR was supposed to take up the road widening works before 2024. However, the company filed a case in court stating that it incurred losses of 20 lakh per day and 6 crore per month following the drastic fall in vehicular traffic after the bifurcation of AP in 2014. It contended that heavy vehicles, particularly sand-laden trucks, used to ply between Hyderabad and AP in massive numbers which came down after the bifurcation due to restrictions imposed by the AP govt on sale of sand from its soil to neighbouring states.
Telangana minister Komatireddy Venkata Reddy, who hails from Nalgonda district, is said to have played a key role in prevailing upon Union minister Nitin Gadkari to widen the national highway by explaining the massive number of casualties in road accidents on the stretch. Venkata Reddy’s only son Prateek Reddy died in a road accident on the Hyderabad ORR.
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