With the Government authorising the Central road making agency to monetise the public-funded highway projects, NHAI is eyeing up to Rs20,000 crore from monetisation of 30 to 40 projects in the first phase.
An NHAI official said that the authority is hopeful of bidding out a few projects by December but the process is going to be a continuous exercise and NHAI would take it from time to time. “We hope that in the next two months we should be able to bid out our first few projects. We are getting DPRs (detailed project reports) prepared...We will be looking at the issues connected to the projects,” said the official.
“The traffic studies related to that projects, the revenue streams available and overall the viability of the project, as soon as those are ready, we will bunch some of these projects and will be able to bid them out,” he said adding that there was enthusiasm about the scheme and NHAI was confident there will be a large number of takers for these.
NHAI is hopeful that as soon as it launches the scheme there will be a sufficient number of takers, he said adding, this would be good in the overall interest of the country as private sector operators will come to manage the roads and “they will be able to bring in a special focus on safety practices”.
“Monetisation of projects would be undertaken in a selective manner so that we can raise funds, we would like private sector efficiencies in operating and managing those projects and we do require monetisation to be able to provide us with the requisite fund support that we require to expand our footprint in our programme,” said NHAI Chairman Raghav Chandra.
The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs on August 3 authorised NHAI to monetise the public funded highway projects which could result in funds in the range of Rs80,000 to Rs1 lakh crore initially. Around 75 operational NH projects completed under public funding have been preliminarily identified for potential monetisation using the toll operate transfer (TOT) Model.
The corpus generated from proceeds of such project monetisation could be utilised by the Government to meet its fund requirements regarding future development and operation and maintenance of highways in the country and could address development of highways in unviable geographies.