Bangalore: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Saturday laid the foundation stone for a 10km expressway project here.
Touted to be the first of its kind, the corridor will have a four-lane elevated highway to ferry thousands to their workplace in the electronics city and a six-lane highway on the ground to link Hosur across the state border to Tamil Nadu.
The Rs.4.5-billion (Dh375 million) project, being executed under the public-private partnership by the National Highway Authority of India (NHAI) and the Karnataka government, is to be completed in 24 months and ease traffic snarls on the national highway (NH-7).
Flagging off the project, Singh said the state-of-the-art expressway would symbolise what Bangalore has come to represent the world over.
"You are on the highway of rapid progress in our country, while many other regions continue to remain behind, moving slowly.
"The elevated highway will enable those who function in a fast-moving and rapidly growing economy to keep pace with the competition they face in a globalised world," Singh said in his address.
About 5,000 people had gathered to witness the event.
In order to ensure that Bangalore maintains its global brand and competitive edge, the prime minister said the central government had taken several initiatives to provide world-class road connectivity around the city.
The ministry of surface transport is involved in making the Bangalore-Nelamangala stretch of NH-4 into a six-lane one, including a four-km elevated corridor.
The four-lane Bangalore-Devenahalli section of National Highway-7, where the international airport is coming up, is being made into six lanes.
The Bangalore-Kolar section of NH-4 will have four lanes.
These projects will facilitate travel to and from Bangalore and remove the bottlenecks that have been slowing the increasing vehicular traffic on the national highways in the region.
