The National Highways Authority of India has awarded Atlanta Ltd, a leading infrastructure development and construction company, the contract to strengthen, widen operate and maintain a stretch of the 41-km Nagpur-Kondhali road on NH-6 outside Nagpur city. The project aims at converting the existing two-lane road into a four-lane dual carriageway from km 9.2 to km 50.
The road project forms part of a plan to build infrastructure around the multimodal international passenger and cargo hub airport at Nagpur. Changi Airports International of Singapore has won the technical service agreement with the Maharashtra government to develop MIHAN.
Atlanta has incorporated a special purpose vehicle called Balaji Tollways Ltd to implement the road project. The scope of the project includes design, engineering, financing, procurement, construction, operation and maintenance of the highway.
The highway is a busy section of NH-6 and carries both intra-state and inter-state traffic. NH-6 starts from Kolkata and after traversing through West Bengal, Jharkhand, Orissa, Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra terminates in Gujarat.
BTL, the concessionaire, is expected to recover its project cost and returns through toll collected from the users of the highway. Toll collection is likely to start from December 2008 and last up to June 2026. The concessionaire period is 20 years (including 2.5 years of construction) and the project cost is Rs 2,262.4 million.