Bengaluru, Belagavi, Chitradurga to get ring roads under Bharatmala project

Bengaluru, Belagavi and Chitradurga will get new ring roads, while  five towns of Karnataka will get bypasses and expansion of lane to ease the traffic under the Bharatmala project announced by the Centre.

The ambitious Rs 6.92 lakh-crore project aims to build 83,677 km of roads over the next five years that include 44 corridors with a consistent infrastructure of minimum four-lane configuration from the existing six. The corridors would be used to transport up to 80% of freight across the country.

“We will roll out most of the projects under Bharatmala by December 2018. Detailed project reports of 25,000 km of highways are almost ready,” Road Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari told reporters here.

The ministry had identified 185 choke points on the corridor networks and plans to build 28 ring roads, 45 bypasses, 34 lane expansions and 12 other interventions to ease the movement of traffic.

New ring roads would be built in Bengaluru, Belagavi and Chitradurga, while bypasses would be developed in Ballari, Raichur, Hosapet and Bagalkot. In Tumakuru, additional lanes would be added to the Mumbai-Chennai corridor that touches the town and a new vehicular underpass would be built to ease the movement of traffic.

A multimodal logistics park would also come up in Bengaluru to improve the movement of freight on exisiting corridors. The park is expected to serve four key functions – freight aggregation and distribution, multimodal freight movement, storage and warehousing, and value-added services such as custom clearances.

New corridors

The 44 new economic corridors include the Bengaluru-Mallapuram (323 km), Bengaluru-Mangaluru (319 km), Bengaluru-Nellore (286 km), Mangaluru-Raichur (461 km) and the Solapur-Ballari-Gooty (434 km) corridors aimed at connecting important production and consumption centres.

The new corridors were planned after studying the movement of commodities from each district to other 600 districts, Gadkari said.

The Bharatmala Pariyojana Phase-I includes new construction and upgrade of 24,800 km of roads and 10,000 km of pending National Highways Development Project works. In addition, the government also plans to implement in parallel 48,877 km of works under various schemes in the northeastern region and areas affected by left-wing extremism.

“This adds up to 83,677 km,” the minister said, adding that 550 of the 600 districts of the country would be connected by four-lane highways.

DH News Service