Lucknow-Agra Expressway
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India’s longest expressway
Ashish Misra , My Way is the Highway “ India Today “ 24/11/2016
Two years ago, a day after the 75th birthday of the Samajwadi Party (SP) supremo, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Uttar Pradesh chief minister Akhilesh Yadav held a grand celebration for his father to mark the event. Mulayam laid the foundation stone for the Agra-Lucknow expressway that very day, and as he took the dais to make a speech, he said: "Jab hum mukhyamantri thhe, tab shilanyas ke samay hi udghatan ki tareekh bhi tay ho jati thi (when I was chief minister, we would decide the inauguration date at the time of laying the foundation)." He then called upon Chakresh Jain, the director of one of the companies constructing the expressway, asking when the project would be complete. When Jain said it would take two years, Mulayam replied, "I am cutting two months. You have to complete this expressway in 22 months." Construction began in earnest in January the following year. 23 months later, on the eve of his 77th birthday, he got his wish: amidst a ceremony that included Sukhoi and Mirage fighter jets performing test landings, Mulayam inaugurated the 302-kilometre-long Agra-Lucknow expressway. Incidentally, it was Mulayam who, as defence minister in the H.D. Deve Gowda government, had cleared the Sukhoi deal.
The expressway is expected to bring cheer to many. Noida-based Nishant Arora, 35, could not meet his parents this Diwali in Lucknow because he could not get a confirmed railway ticket, and did not want to hazard the 10-hour journey by road. Before the Agra-Lucknow expressway, only part of his journey-from Noida to Agra via the 165-km-long Yamuna expressway-would have taken him on a high-speed highway. Now, the state government claims the travel time from Agra to Lucknow has been reduced to just three-and-a-half hours, reducing Nishant's journey to under six hours. In the run-up to the 2017 assembly election, Akhilesh hopes to showcase the expressway as one of the highlights of his administration. It will help him counter the BJP's claim of being the development-oriented party. "If you double the speed, you'll triple the economy," he said at the inauguration of this project. The event also served to allay fears about the leadership crisis within the SP. To back up that message, Mulayam even revoked the suspension of his cousin Ram Gopal Yadav, three days before the inauguration. As Professor Lav Kush Misra, dean of Management College, Agra University, says, "All [of Mulayam's] family members were present. This gives a positive message to the Yadav votebank. It also makes clear that Akhilesh Yadav, with his development agenda, will be the face of the SP in the coming assembly election."
However, it was not an entirely smooth ride. Initially, the expressway was to be constructed under the public-private partnership model, but no companies showed interest in it. After the parliamentary elections in 2014, the Uttar Pradesh Expressways Industrial Development Authority (UPEIDA) was given the task, with a senior IAS officer, Navneet Sehgal, as CEO. The expressway was divided into five sectors-Agra to Firozabad, Firozabad to Etawah, Etawah to Kannauj, Kannauj to Unnao and Unnao to Lucknow. Four different companies were then engaged to construct these sectors. The attempt bore fruit, according to a senior official of the UPEIDA. "Involving different companies bred competition, which was good for us," he says. Another hurdle was land acquisition. Says Sehgal, "Instead of acquiring land, we decided to purchase it. To make the deal more [appealing], owners were offered four times the circle rates in rural areas and double in urban areas." Hari Ram, president of the Bharatiya Kisan Union (Lucknow region), agrees: "During the land acquisition process, no major protests from the farmers were reported. It indicates that the process was farmer-friendly." In cases where purchase was not possible, the acquisition process laid down in the Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013, was followed. To ensure that financial red tape did not delay the project, UPEIDA transferred the land budgets to the district magistrates of the relevant districts. This bore fruit: UPEIDA completed a total of 28,235 registries between June 2014 and January 2015, having purchased more than 3,200 hectares of land. The project also broke new ground: it is the first in the country that can serve as an emergency air strip. This was on full display on November 21, when six Indian Air Force fighter jets landed on the expressway.
However, not everyone is happy. Says Bahujan Samaj Party national president Mayawati: "Instead of focusing on administration, the chief minister is in hurry to inaugurate incomplete projects." The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) questioned the route. "It is not a coincidence that the Agra-Lucknow expressway passes through the stronghold of the Mulayam Singh Yadav family," says state BJP spokesperson Dr Chandramohan. However, Sehgal says the "Agra-Lucknow expressway passes through the shortest distance between Agra and Lucknow".
That said, Nishant will have to wait a bit longer. The expressway will be opened to the public only in late December, after a security audit by state and central agencies.
In brief
The Financial Express, November 21, 2016
India’s longest expressway is without a doubt one of the most major infrastructure projects in the country.
1) The Agra-Lucknow Expressway has a design speed of up to 120 kms per hour. The Agra-Lucknow Expressway will have automatic traffic management systems aimed at reducing road accidents and helping even at the time of fog.
2) The six-lane expressway is expandable to 8-lanes. Reports suggest that the bridges and underpasses have been made 8-lane to avoid traffic congestion and bottlenecks once the expressway is expanded to 8-lane. The expressway has an 8-lane bridge across the river Ganga. This will connect Kanpur and Unnao.
3) The expressway includes 4 rail over bridges, 13 major bridges, 57 minor bridges, 74 vehicular underpasses, 148 pedestrian underpasses and 9 flyovers.
4) The entire Expressway is planned to be lined with metal beam crash barrier on both sides and wire fencing State-of-the-art Advance Traffic management System for safe & secure transit.
5) The Agra-Lucknow Expressway has been built in a record time of 23 months by the Uttar Pradesh Expressways Industrial Development Authority (UPEIDA). The UP government chose different builders for different stretches of the highway. The estimated cost of construction of the Agra-Lucknow Expressway was Rs 15,000 crore, but the UP government claims that it was completed in Rs 13,200 crore. Agra-Lucknow expressway, facts of Agra-Lucknow expressway, agra expressway, lucknow agra expressway The Agra-Lucknow Expressway has a design speed of up to 120 kms per hour.
6) The Agra-Lucknow Expressway boasts of development centres, agricultural mandis, schools, ITIs, rest houes, petrol pumps, service centres and public amenities among other prominent features.
7) The expressway spans 10 districts, 236 villages and 3500 hectares of land. It connects Agra and Lucknow via Shikohabad, Firozabad, Mainpuri, Etawah, Auraiya, Kannauj, Kanpur Nagar, Unnao and Hardoi. The expressway passes through 4 National Highways, 2 state highways, and 5 rivers (Ganga, Yamuna, Isan, Sai and Kalyani). The expressway will start at the village of Etmadpur Madra near Agra and will end at the village of Sarosa Bharosa near Mohan Road, Lucknow).
8) The Agra-Lucknow Expressway will be connected to the famous Yamuna Expressway via an Agra Ring Road. This will help provide the requisite connectivity to the national capital of Delhi and NCR areas like Noida.
9) According to the UP government, the objective of the Agra-Lucknow Expressway is to ensure development of nearby areas, provide a fast-moving corridor that allows seamless travel, reduce the carbon footprint of vehicles that travel between the two cities, help farmers to expand reach of their products to larger cities, and attract investors in the state.
10) According to (UPEIDA), a green belt is being developed on the sides of the Agra-Lucknow expressway by planting trees on either sides and plants in the median.
A story of land acquisition feat
The Times of India May 28 2015
Swati Mathur
3,000 hectares acquired for 302-km Lucknow-Agra Expressway without dissent
Even as the debate over the land acquisition bill threatens to boil over across India, the Samajwadi Party-led government in Uttar Pradesh has acquired nearly 3,000 hectares of fertile, multi-cropped land for its sixlane Agra-Lucknow greenfield expressway project without a murmur of dissent. At a time when farmer groups were registering their protests against the alleged dilution of the consent clause in the NDA government's land ordinance, 30,074 farmers in UP were giving up fertile tracts of the Indo-Gangetic plain, willingly , and, in many cases, in record time.
So how did this speedy acquisition for the Rs 15,000 crore project happen?bb
By keeping farmers happy, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav told TOI. When UP Expressway Industrial Development Authority (UPEIDA), the nodal agency for implementing the project, set out to acquire land for the developers of the expressway project, it decided to avoid the contentious “acquisition“ process almost entirely . “Instead of acquiring land as is usually done, it was decided to purchase land from far mers through a mutual agreement. To make the transaction more lucrative, land owners were offered four times the circle rates (CR) in rural areas, and twice the CR in urban parts, as purchase cost. Acquisition was only considered in cases where mutual agreement failed,“ said Navneet Sehgal, chief executive, UPEIDA. The government's flagship 302-km expressway is a six-lane (expandable to eight) access controlled greenfield project, the longest in the country till date. To build it by October 2016, as the chief minister has promised to do, the UP government needs a total of 3,368.60 hectares of land cutting across 232 revenue villages from Agra to Lucknow, and passing through the districts of Mainpuri, Etawah, Kannauj, Auraiyya and Unnao. In the 270 days between June 2014 and January this year, UPEIDA completed about 27,000 registries at the rate of about 10 a day, arguably the fastest yet, for a government-run expressway project of this magnitude.
To achieve this, UPEIDA paid, till May 15, 2015, Rs 2,844.55 crore to make an outright purchase of 2,824.16 hec tares of land from individual land owners, and 303.29 hectares from government departments, almost 93% of the total land it needed. Assistant CEO UPEIDA, Ashutosh Dubey said, “The government set up rate fixation committees under the chairmanship of the district magistrate to arrive at a mutually agreeable rate. After the approval of the CEO, land owners were given four times, or twice the CR depending on the location of their land. Apart from their land holdings, owners were also compensated for permanent structures built on their land, and for unharvested crops.“
When TOI contacted land owners who gave up their land through a mutual agreement with the state government, reactions were mixed. In Unnao, which falls under segment 5 of the expressway project and is being developed by Larsen & Toubro Limited, Jagdamba Singh, a resident of Matariya village, confirmed he had received four times the circle rate. “My village was on the Unnao-Lucknow border, but on the Unnao side. My compensation, as a result, was paid according to the prevailing DM circle rates in Unnao. The neighbouring village that falls in Lucknow, however, received a higher compensation. So even though I got four times, I felt cheated,“ Singh said.
In Etawah's Takha tehsil, Bakridan begum walked away with a compensation of Rs 8.91 lakh for selling 2.5 bighas of land held in her name. Her son, Naseem Khan told TOI, “We used about Rs 98,000 for a wedding in the family. We are also in advanced stages of talks over the purchase of additional agriculture land with the compensation money we received.“ In both cases, Singh and Khan said their families will remain invested in farming and did not plan to use the surplus funds to diversify their businesses.
Not all land holders, however, were agreeable to selling their land to the government. In such cases, UP opted for the land acquisition process as prescribed under the Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act of 2013, and acquired 160.28 hectares of land. Here, while the rate of compensation remained the same, beneficiaries were offered an extra payment at an interest rate prescribed within the state's rules.
The benefits of the dual model -acquisition plus purchase -were many . “This model allowed UP to facilitate land transfer to developers in record time,“ Dubey said. Since the state's pur chase-acquisition process started in June last year, UPEIDA now has a land pool of 3,287.73 hectares of the 3,368.60 hectares it needed; that's 97.6% of the land it needed, organized in less than one year.
The success of the Agra-Lucknow “expressway“ model of acquiring land through mutual agreements and through the acquisition route has now been extended to other construction projects as well. “It is a smoother, faster process. More significantly, though, farmers and land holders get a much better deal for their land than they would if we went the acquisition way . That would have been also much more time-consuming,“ Dubey added.
Politically , too, the Lucknow-Agra expressway project is expected to yield big benefits for the Samajwadi Party .With chief minister Akhilesh Yadav FOCUSING on “doubling the speed to triple the economy“, the project not only reduces travel time between Delhi and Lucknow, but also promises to become a hub around which industrial activity can flourish. More significantly , at a time when the land acquisition legislation remains a controversial, hot button issue, UP has charted its own course with the expressway .
