Hyderabad: Over 500 km of major district roads – 50 km in each district – in Telangana will be given over to private agencies for maintenance.
The World Bank will provide the funds for development of roads and the mandatory condition is five-year maintenance with priority to road safety norms.
The width of these roads will be doubled, from single to double lanes, and from double to four lanes. The list of the roads will be finalised soon.
The roads and buildings department will fix the internal benchmark value for maintenance of these roads and then call for tenders.
“The state government will pay per kilometre for maintenance of these roads. There are a lot of allegations that the roads are poorly maintained and bad roads have led to many accidents resulting in economic loss, casualties and injuries. The World Bank project aims at focusing on road safety and reducing accidents,”said a senior official in the roads and buildings department.
Officials said “road safety” was on top of the agenda of the World Bank-funded projects and a demonstration project was already in progress from Hyderabad to Vijayapura (Bijapur) in Karnataka.
Christened “125-km long road safety Hyderabad-Vijayapura Demo Project”, it aims at improving 20 sharp curves, correcting accident prone areas, providing trauma care centres at every 50 km, highway patrol vans and teams with first aid equipment, translocation of 129 trees, proper road signage and alert boards and widening of stretches at required points.
Roads and buildings executive engineer Bapi Raju confirmed that the main job of the private agencies would be initial rectification of potholes, minor improvements like approach roads to bridges and culverts and slopes, correcting or leveling areas beyond the shoulders of the road, renewal, repair, recarpeting of roads and to keep the roads always in motorable condition, painting, cleaning and keeping road signage clearly visible and reacting immediately in times of floods, cyclone or road collapse.
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