Bangalore's expressway project stuck in Gridlock

Construction of the rest of expressway has been stalled for 16 yrs

Driving from Bangalore to Mysore in an hour’s time is still an elusive dream due to a project stalled by accusations of a land grab and a faulty MoU.

How much time does it take to build an expressway between two cities 140 kilometres apart? In the case of the Bangalore-Mysore expressway, the answer is an incredible sixteen long years, and counting.

In the gridlocked capital of Karnataka, the 14-km drive on the six-lane expressway, starting from a southern suburb of Bangalore to the northern part of the city is a dream. It hardly takes any effort or time. The road is not exactly an autobahn, but for people trundling around a congested Bangalore, it will feel like one.

Still, the expressway is essentially only a peripheral ring road of a larger, Rs 2,000 crore Bangalore-Mysore Expressway project that has been in the works for around 16 years. Only the peripheral part (56 kms) has been completed so far. Dogged by various allegations about land grabbing and deliberate slowing down of the project, the Nandi Infrastructure Corridor Enterprise (NICE)—the company responsible for this project—recently won its 566th case when the Supreme Court rejected a Lok Ayukta probe into the project.

That doesn’t mean that the project has shed itself of controversy. Firstly, after 16 long years, NICE, a subsidiary of BF Utilities of the Bharat Forge Group, only has a peripheral ring road within Bangalore city as its only achievement. Moreover, there is no connection at Bannerghata Road (an IT corridor) to another IT corridor the stretch to Electronics City—which is a glaring oversight. Then, there are accusations by former Prime Minister Deve Gowda who has been stating that this project is nothing but a land-grab, disguised in the form of infrastructure development. The main allegation is that in addition to building the 164 km expressway connecting Bangalore to Mysore, NICE will get nearly 10,000 acres along it to build sprawling townships from land which it will get at cheaper cost.“It is true that NICE will build 5 mega townships along the expressway but we are ready to give the true value of land to the people who want to sell it to us. While many are willing to sell, there are few who are not and some others are being brainwashed into not giving up their land for our project,” claims Ashok Kheny, MD, NICE. He has been waging a long battle against his detractors for many years and he shows no signs of giving up — nor is there any indication that Deve Gowda will.

V Ravichandar, chairman, Feedback Consulting, one of the experts on the infrastructure projects in Bangalore says that while NICE is to be complimented for hanging in despite many efforts to get them to exit, part of the problem is due to poor project structuring of the MoU from the outset of the MoU.“For instance leasehold land for development to the private party should have been linked to milestones on the entire BMIC corridor —now we have a situation that till the land is completely handed over, there is no obligation to complete the corridor. Government is to blame for structuring such an MoU in the first place,” he said.

The 56-km peripheral project itself took almost a decade to build with the idea to alleviate the problem of the commercial traffic travelling on the busy NH 4 and NH 7 (linking Chennai in the south to Mumbai in the west) without crossing central Bangalore by a fast, grade-separated peripheral road.

With heavy commercial traffic using this link, and an average of Rs 20 lakh per day in toll collections, this asset recently attracted J P Morgan to invest around Rs 450 crore to complete the stretch and also look at a township on the outskirts of Bangalore at Bidadi, a town through which the expressway will proceed on to Mysore. “If we can complete the journey from Mysore to Bangalore in an hour’s time it will decongest Bangalore to a large extent but we are not getting any land to execute the expressway,” notes Kheny.

Even as this project meanders along to what appears to be a never-ending controversy, NICE is now embarking on some real estate development on the land which they have along the peripheral ring road. For starters, Kheny is planning to roll out nearly 10 million square feet of housing projects starting right from low income to villas to suit various sections of the society. “As and when we get the land for the expressway, we will execute the project. But until then, this will be related development which we will take up,” Kheny says

What could be a way out of this fiasco? “Let’s look forward. NICE has Court orders that needs to be implemented. In return, the government should negotiate a time bound completion of the entire corridor. I can’t see any other way of bringing this to closure that gives citizens the expressway that definitely is needed—the legal fine print is such that we don’t have options.”