PM inaugurates Bangalore elevated highway project
Bangalore: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh Saturday laid the foundation stone for a 10 km expressway project here that is expected to provide world class road connectivity to India's IT city.
Touted to be the first of its kind, the corridor will have a four-lane elevated highway to ferry thousands to their workplace in the electronics city and a six-lane highway on the ground to link Hosur across the state border to Tamil Nadu.
The Rs.4.5-billion project, being executed under the public-private partnership by the National Highway Authority of India (NHAI) and the Karnataka government, is to be completed in 24 months and ease traffic snarls on the national highway (NH-7).
Flagging off the project, Singh said the state-of-the-art expressway would symbolise what Bangalore has come to represent the world over.
"You are on the highway of rapid progress in our country, while many other regions continue to remain behind, moving slowly. The elevated highway will enable those who function in a fast-moving and rapidly growing economy to keep pace with the competition they face in a globalised world," Singh said in his address. About 5,000 people had gathered to witness the event.
In order to ensure that Bangalore maintains its global brand and competitive edge, the prime minister said the central government had taken several initiatives to provide world-class road connectivity around the city.
The ministry of surface transport is involved in making the Bangalore-Nelamangala stretch of NH-4 into a six-lane one, including a four-km elevated corridor. The four-lane Bangalore-Devenahalli section of NH-7, where the international airport is coming up, is being made into six-lane. The Bangalore-Kolar section of NH-4 will have four lanes.
These projects will facilitate travel to and from Bangalore and remove the bottlenecks that have been slowing the increasing vehicular traffic on the national highways in the region.
"The urban landscape of India is changing rapidly. In the coming years, about 40 percent of our population will be residing in urban areas. These urban areas must be seen as engines of growth, as places where there are economies of scale and scope and hence, as hubs of economic, commercial and social activity," the prime minister said.
"As the benefits of urbanisation spread into rural areas and as rural development brings urban facilities to rural areas, the nature of commuting between town and country will change," Manmohan Singh pointed out.
In a veiled attack on the opponents of development projects, the prime minister said some people had wrongly poised the question of development as a conflict between city and village.
"This is a false notion. No country can develop if its villages do not develop. Mahatma Gandhi told us all, very wisely and sagely, that India lives in its villages. So it does today. When we seek the modernization of our economy, when we seek to build an industrialised country, when we seek to create a knowledge economy - all of this must benefit both the town and country, both city and village. And it can. The roads and highways are the means to achieving it."
Regretting that the existing road system did not as yet cater to the growing demands of urban and rural areas, Manmohan Singh said the benefits of development had to move beyond the limited confines of cities to the vast hinterlands so that millions could also become partners in progress.
"Today, we see poor people from villages coming into cities for work. Tomorrow, we could see economically better off people living in rural areas commuting to the city for pleasure rather than business. We could see increased demand for better quality public transport between town and country. There will also be greater demand for rapid transport between production centres and markets. We need to strike a balance to ensure uniform growth and all-round development."
Besides Minister for Shipping, Road Transport and Highways T.R. Balu, Karnataka Governor T.N. Chaturvedi, Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy, his deputy B.S. Yediyurappa and former chief minister and opposition leader N. Dharam Singh were present on the occasion.
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