Mega freight corridor project waiting to take off.

The next government at the Centre will inherit a project that is virtually 'shovel-ready'.

The 2,800-km Dedicated Freight Corridor (DFC) -connecting Ludhiana in Punjab to Sonnagar, Bihar, in the East, and Dadri in Uttar Pradesh to JNPT, near Mumbai, in the West - requires nearly 9,700 hectares, of which, over 94 per cent has already been acquired.

The bulk of the regulatory approvals - from environmental, forest and tree-felling permissions to issues with the Archaeological Survey of India - has also been obtained.'Land acquisition is almost complete, except for a 540-km extension stretch from Sonnagar to Dankuni near Kolkata. In the sections where contract awarding has started, acquisition is 100 per cent,' said RK Gupta, MD, DFC Corporation of India.

The same goes for other statutory clearances, such as environmental approvals, a bugbear for most large projects in recent times. 'We have some pending Coastal Regulation Zone clearances near Mumbai and a stretch passing through Dahanu Taluka in Maharashtra. But even these are at the final stage,' Gupta told Business Line.


HBL