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Ircon International and Patel Infrastructure are among the five players that have bagged contracts to build the first phase of Vadodara-Mumbai Expressway.
Others that have won contracts to construct the expressway are Ashoka Concessions, IRB Infrastructure, and Sadbhav Engineering. These five players have bagged projects for roughly ₹6,000 crore.
Project cost
The project stretch for which the work has been awarded is between Vadodara and Kim, located near Surat. The cost of land acquisition on this stretch is another ₹4,000 crore, pushing the total project cost to about ₹10,000 crore. The total project cost of the Mumbai-Vadodara Expressway is expected to be in the range of ₹40,000-₹44,000 crore. Forty per cent of the total project cost has gone towards acquiring land in the first phase of Vadodara-Mumbai Expressway.
Recently, the Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari announced that work on the Vadodara-Mumbai Expressway project will start next month.
He also announced that the Delhi-Mumbai Expressway, which is on the agenda of the government, will cost about ₹1 lakh crore. He added that they are trying to arrive at a new route alignment for the project that will cut the land acquisition costs.
Expertise
“If we have the expressway along the exisiting route, the cost per hectare will be ₹7 crore, and if we acquire land along a new alignment, the project cost will drop to ₹70-80 lakh per hectare,” he said.
Several of the firms that have won the Mumbai-Vadodara contracts have expertise in building expressways and had participated in the building of Eastern Peripheral Expressway (EPE) around Delhi.
Those involved in the building of Eastern Peripheral Expressway include Sadbhav Engineering, Ashoka Buildcon, Oriental Structural Engineers and Gayatri Projects. One phase of Delhi-Meerut Expressway, a 14-lane expressway, is another stretch to be inaugurated soon.
The Highways Ministry has set a target to award works for around 20,000 km length of National Highways in 2018-19. This is about 25 per cent more than the 17,055 km awarded during 2017-18.
The construction targets for 2018-19 have been set at 16,420 km.
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