Finally some sense of responsibility has returned to the otherwise sleepy prime minister Manmohan Singh as he has set an ambitious target of awarding public private partnership projects worth Rs 1.15 trillion over the next six months.
These projects will come up in the six core infrastructure sectors– coal, power, railways, roads, shipping and aviation and include a new metro line in Mumbai worth around Rs 30,000-crore to elevated rail corridor connecting Churchgate in the extreme south to Virar in the far-flung northern suburb, a Rs 23,000-crore underground metro conneting Colaba in the south of the megapolis to Andheri in the north; power and transmission projects costing Rs 40,000 crore, two new airports worth Rs 20,000 crore and a Rs 10,000-crore port project in either Andhra or Bengal. In the rail sector, the government is looking to expedite two loco factories worth Rs 5,000 crore and speed up the work on the Eastern Dedicated Freight Corridor project being built with Japanese aid.
The PM has also formed an inter-ministerial group with the finance, planning and railways ministries to come up with a creative mechanism to finance and implement the large backlog of projects worth over Rs 200,000 crore in a time-bound manner. He also reiterated the government’s commitment to creating a Rail Tariff Authority to depoliticise railway fares. To shore up the aviation sector, Singh has set a target of setting up new international airports at Bhubaneswar and Imphal and 50 new low-cost small airports to be built by the Airports Authority of India. He has also asked the aviation ministry to award eight greenfield projects in 2013-14, including several airports that were also part of last years targets, such as Navi Mumbai, Goa and Kannur in north Kerala.
In fact Mumbai will have two new airports if the proposals got– one in Navi Mumbai and the other at Juhu. A government release said that the besides the two greenfield airports in Mumbai six others across the country would be bid out during this financial year. One of them will be in Pune. Moreover, five low-cost airports will also be awarded this year in Maharashtra and these are at Kolhapur ,Nasik, Jalgaon, Solapur and Amravati.
These are part of the long list of 50 new low-cost small airports which the government plans to award this year. These airports will come up by upgrading the existing small airports the Airports Authority has in these cities.
