The National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) has set February as the deadline to complete land acquisition in Ernakulam, as part of the project to widen the 164-km Edappally-Ramanattukara (Kozhikode) stretch of NH 66 into a six-lane corridor.
The 45-metre corridor will be flanked by two-lane service roads on either side. This will result in the bottlenecked, congested and accident-prone largely two-lane corridor metamorphosing into a roughly 10-lane stretch. The deadline to commission the widened highway is 30 months after land acquisition. It will be extended to a maximum of 36 months, if needed.
The quantum of compensation for land that ought to be acquired in Ernakulam was fixed a week ago, with ₹40.93 lakh set as the maximum compensation per cent, for category A land in Edappally North.
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With land acquisition getting over in Thrissur, the contract to construct the highway was awarded recently. An agreement will shortly be reached with the contracting firm, following which men and materials will be mobilised, official sources said. The contracting firm which won the bid has already begun mobilising men and materials in Malappuram, they added.
Considerable progress has been made for the project to widen the 25-km Edappally-Kodungalloor NH 66 stretch into a six-lane highway, with a bulk of land acquisition proceedings over, following which widening and road construction work will begin in May, sources in the NHAI said.
The Edappally-Ramanattukara NH 66 stretch is part of the Mumbai-Kanyakumari NH corridor. The stretch has been divided into five reaches, where road construction work will be held simultaneously to adhere to the 2024 deadline.
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Approximately, ₹10,700 crore is expected to be disbursed for acquiring 400 hectares in the three districts for the highway project.
Kochi-Theni NH
The NHAI is subsequently expected to focus shift on hewing out a greenfield NH having four- or six-lane width on the Netoor-Theni stretch to decongest the narrow and accident-prone Kundannoor-Theni NH.