The National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) has auctioned two completed highway stretches for INR 6,584 crore under its monetisation programme. The highways authority had rebid the projects under the Toll, Operate and Transfer (TOT) model and this time it managed to get nearly 9% higher price than last time.
The first project — 84-km Allahabad Bypass in Uttar Pradesh — has been bagged by Cube Highways, quoting INR 2,156 crore while the IRB Infra Trust has got the Lalitpur–Sagar-Lakhnadon (316 km) project in UP and Madhya Pradesh at INR 4,428 crore.
The contract period is for 20 years during which these private players will maintain and operate these corridors. They will be allowed to collect user fee (toll) as notified by the government and retain them for recovery of their investment.
NHAI chairman Santosh Yadav told TOI, “We opened the financial bids on Friday and we completed all the procedures within 24 hours. The letters of award (LoA) were issued on Saturday night after getting all required consent of NHAI board members. We are putting in our best efforts to cut down the procedural delays. Monetisation of highways is high on our agenda.”
This is the first set of TOT that NHAI has completed this financial year and targets to bid out a couple of more bundles of highway projects before March.
NHAI officials said that the authority getting a better price in the rebidding signals that the authority will sell projects only when they are assured of robust revenue. “As such we are getting toll from all operational highways and so there is no hurry to auction projects, if we don’t get a good price. The revenue from auctioning of more projects is going to grow as we offer projects which we are getting back from private players after the end of their concession period,” said a source.
In the past five years, the NHAI has monetised 1,614 km of operational NH projects for INR 26,366 crore. This excludes the recent two projects. It has also raised INR 10,200 crore through InVIT for 636 km of NH stretches.
