It would cut travel time to 10 hours; highway will have CCTV and Wifi umbrella; en route, govt plans to set up IT parks and Smart Cities.
Mumbai : Maharashtra would soon have a new 800-km-long “Communication Super Highway” connecting the sub-capital Nagpur to the capital of the state, Mumbai, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis informed the legislative assembly here on Friday.
The Rs. 30000 crore worth project would be completed by 2019, he said. The expressway, which will traverse through Ghoti-Aurangabad-Amravati and touch Nagpur, is expected to slash travel time to Mumbai from the current 15 hours to just 10 hours.
“The new expressway would connect all the regions of the state where there is a huge backlog of development. This would also facilitate decentralization of development, which has been concentrated primarily in the golden triangle of Mumbai-Pune-Nasik,” Fadnavis said.
“It was the Bharatiya Janata Party-Shiv Sena government’s vision that gave the state its first expressway. Now this new road will boost our efforts to take development to the remotest parts of the state,” he added.
The opposition however, said that it is in line with the present government’s policy to take all the important projects to Nagpur. Like the Mumbai-Pune expressway, the new Mumbai-Nagpur expressway too would be a tolled road. In the first phase it will have four lanes, which would be increased to six lanes later.
“It will have other sophisticated features like an optical fibre network, CCTV, Wifi umbrella and other facilities, making it a ‘communication super highway’ in the real sense,” Fadnavis said.
En route, the government plans to set up IT parks, Smart Cities, educational complexes and other infrastructure which would benefit the local regions through which the route would pass.
The project will be taken up in two phases with land acquisition and four concrete lanes in the first phase.
In the second phase, six lanes, along with related infrastructure, access, exit and connecting roads, tunnels, flyovers etc shall be completed. Since this will be treated as a project of importance by the state it will seek partnership with the Centre on financing and others aspects, the chief minister said. He also said that the project would be developed by the Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation.
