India to get 44 new economic corridors by December 2018 under ambitious Rs 7-lakh crore highway programme

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NEW DELHI: India will witness the development of 44 new corridors, apart from the existing six, under the ambitious Rs 7-lakh crore umbrella highway programme. The corridors are likely to be rolled out by December 2018.

Apart from 44 new corridors, 65 inter-corridor and feeder roads and besides 115 feeder roads are coming up.

BharatMala program includes development of 44 Economic Corridors, 66 Inter Corridor Routes & 116 Feeder Routes pic.twitter.com/fMBlHyUWuj — Nitin Gadkari (@nitin_gadkari) October 25, 2017

"We will roll out most of the Rs 7 lakh crore projects announced by the government yesterday, before December 2018. The programme is the biggest infrastructure programme, including Bharatmala, that will see India having 50 corridors including the existing six," said Union Minister Nitin Gadkari said on Wednesday.

The 44 new economic corridors will include the following: 

1. Mumbai-Kolkata
2. Mumbai-Kanyakumari
3. Amritsar-Jamnagar
4. Kandla-Sagar
5. Agra- Mumbai
6. Pune-Vijaywada
7. Raipur-Dhanbad
8. Ludhiana-Ajmer
9. Surat-Nagpur
10. Hyderabad-Panaji
11. Jaipur-Indore
12. Solapur-Nagpur
13. Sagar-Varanasi
14. Kharagpur-Siliguri
15. Raipur-Vishakhapatnam
16. Delhi-Lucknow
17. Chennai-Kurnool 
18. Indore-Nagpur
19. Chennai-Madurai
20. Mangalore-Raichur
21. Tuticorin-Cochin
22. Solapur-Bellary
23. Hyderabad-Auranagabad
24. Delhi-Kanpur
25. Sagar-Lucknow 
26. Sambalpur-Ranchi

The centre on Tuesday gave the go-ahead to the ambitious BharatMala project which envisages to lay a whopping 83,677 km of highways by March 2022 at a cost of about Rs 7 lakh crore.

Briefing about the project, road transport, shipping, highways and water resources minister said it will create 1 crore jobs and contributing 2-3 percent to Gross domestic product or GDP.

Gadhkari further said that road accidents will drop by 50% because of the project. India will have "world-class roads on par with the US and Germany".

"The entire programme will be transparent, corruption- free with full emphasis on quality. Each and every work will be through electronic tenders and the quality of highways would be such that they would see no potholes for the next 100 years," said Gadkari.

The project, he added, was aimed at overhauling India's infrastructure matching Prime Minister Narendra Modi's New India vision.

Bharatmala project will receive a funding of Rs 2.37 lakh crore from the central road fund, Rs 2.05 lakh crore as market borrowing, Rs 34,000 crore from monetisation of highway projects and Rs 60,000 crore through budgetary allocation. Another Rs 1.25 lakh crore is expected from private players.

According to the minister, under the first phase of Bharatmala, a total of 550 districts in the country will be linked with National Highways.

With agency inputs