Modi to unveil Rs 23,000 crore Purvanchal Expressway

 

Virendra Singh Rawat

Lucknow / Nov 8, 2021

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will inaugurate the Rs 23,000 crore Purvanchal Expressway on November 16.

According to sources, Modi will dedicate the mega infra project to public at a ceremony in Sultanpur district of Uttar Pradesh.

Purvanchal Expressway project also entails an airstrip in Sultanpur for the landing and takeoff of the Indian Air Force (IAF) fighter planes during emergency. The inauguration ceremony will be held at the airstrip, which will also witness the PM address a public meeting.

The mega expressway cuts across nine districts viz. Lucknow, Barabanki, Faizabad, Ambedkarnagar, Amethi, Sultanpur, Azamgarh, Mau and Ghazipur. It will provide seamless connectivity to the backward Eastern UP (Purvanchal) region to the National Capital Region (NCR) via Agra-Lucknow Expressway and Greater Noida-Agra Yamuna Expressway.

The project entailed acquisition of 4,330 hectares of land. Earlier, the project was divided into eight packages and awarded to different bidders for expeditious development.

In fact, the expressway has already been thrown open for public use at different stretches even as some of the civil works continued in others, according to a senior UP Expressway Industrial Development Authority (UPEIDA), the nodal agency of the project, here.

Currently, four big expressway projects totalling about Rs 80,000 crore are in different stages of development. These include 340 km Purvanchal Expressway, 296 km Bundelkhand Expressway, 91 km Gorakhpur Link Expressway and 628 km Ganga Expressway.

Most of these infra projects have been funded with bank loans, as such the Yogi Adityanath government did not face any budgetary hurdles in their development.

Meanwhile, the Yogi government is also in the process of holding a competitive bidding for Rs 36,000 crore Ganga Expressway project. In September 2021, the Adityanath cabinet had okayed the bidding document of the project envisioned on public private partnership (PPP) model of DBFOT (design, build, finance, operate, transfer).