Bangalore, Sept. 27: The city?s techies can now fly high on the fast lane.
An elevated toll-and-go motorway to help them race to their workplace at the IT hub, Electronics City, is in the offing, it was announced today.
This four-lane project over a 9-km stretch will help avoid traffic bottlenecks en route to Electronics City, which have prompted a spate of caustic remarks. Fed up with the city?s crumbling infrastructure and poor power supply, Wipro chief Azim Premji had said his company would scout for new venues for future investment.
The project is expected to be complete in three years with three partners chipping in ? the Union ministry for road transport and highways, the Karnataka government and the Electronics City Industries Association.
The feasibility study will be completed by March 2005 and the foundation stone laid by early April, T.R. Baalu, the Union minister for shipping, road transport and highways, told a news conference today.
Baalu said his ministry would undertake a feasibility study for widening the 25-km Bangalore-Hosur road, on which Electronics City is located, in three years. ?As part of the National Highways Development Project, the 25-km road on NH-7 will be widened to six lanes up to 18 km and to eight lanes from the Electronics City to Hosur for fast movement of heavy-duty trucks and high-volume traffic between Bangalore and Chennai.?
The minister added: ?The entire project will be executed in two phases at an estimated cost of Rs 625 crore.? The Electronics City Industries Association will participate in the project with 33.33 per cent equity stake, while the state government and the National Highways Authority of India would be the other stakeholders with similar investment.
Chief minister Dharam Singh said: ?There?s no dearth of funds. We will fund this project because we want to provide good facilities to the IT industry.?
According to H. Prakash Rao, the president of the Electronics City Industries Association, the project was discussed with Baalu yesterday. ?We are very keen on the project and are thinking of a special purpose vehicle (consortium approach). When we discussed this project with Baalu, we told him the sooner this could be constructed the better.?
?I cannot comment on the numbers (in terms of investment by the association) yet because we must work out the details. We raised a number of other issues that ought to be done before building the flyover. We requested better service roads and link roads to ease traffic during the construction,? Rao added.
The idea of the motorway was mooted by Infosys chairman .R. Narayana Murthy in July.
