AP sees white elephant in Kadapa highway

With no scope of revenue earning, the State government will have to bear the burden of coughing up Rs 41 crore once every six months for next 10 years to the contractor as per the agreement

Hyderabad: The decision taken by the erstwhile Congress government to convert the Kadapa-Pulivendula road into a four-lane highway has now become a major headache for the cash-strapped Andhra Pradesh.

According to Roads & Buildings department, the Congress government led by Y S Rajasekhara Reddy had asked to the R&B department to prepare a report justifying the need for a four-lane road in this section. Though the traffic flow on this stretch is not much and a four-lane road will have to wait for another decade before it can hope to witness heavy traffic flow, the department under political pressure justified the need for such a road under Build-Operate-Transfer (BOY) mode at an estimated cost of Rs 812 crore.

The road is now nearing completion and with no scope of revenue earning, the State government will have to bear the burden of coughing up Rs 41 crore once every six months for next 10 years to the contractor as per the agreement. The State government which is facing financial crunch is now mulling over the possibility of introducing tollgate system to meet the financial burden at least partially.

Officials in the R&B department told The Hans India that the construction of a four-lane road was based more on political initiative than requirement. They say a Detailed Feasibility Report (DFR) prepared in 2007 pegged that the average daily traffic on this road was about 4,594 passenger car units (PCUs) per day. The DFR has projected an annual 7.5 per cent growth rate of traffic. Accordingly, the volume of traffic movement between Kadapa and Pulivendula would touch an average of 1,720 PCUs per day by 2024 as per the Indian Road Congress (IRC) standards. Hence as per standards of IRC, a four-lane road between Kadapa and Pulivendula falls under the category of a road constructed without requirement.

The Kadapa R&B Superintendent Engineer Manohar Reddy said that he had recently taken over and cannot make any comment on it. All that he could say was that the works were in the last phase and about five per cent left to be completed.

Earlier, the R&B department had reportedly justified taking up a four-lane road showing increase in the movement of traffic in and around Kadapa, due to setting up Yogi Vemana University and a Nuclear Fuel Complex. But a senior official at the Nuclear Fuel Complex at Hyderabad said that the maximum number of employees at the NFC at Kadapa might not go beyond 6,000 to 7,000. Similarly, the Yogi Vemana University which is just 15 km away from the Kadapa says that they have a residential campus with strength of just 2,000 students, with hostels, one each for boys and girls.

When contacted the university Vice-Chancellor Professor B Syama Sundar, he said, “The total strength in the campus at present is only 15,000.” This means that the university may not contribute to any heavy traffic movement in next five years time.