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All hurdles cleared for NICE projects

6 Aug 2008, 0542 hrs IST,TNN

BANGALORE: The Bangalore-Mysore Infrastructure Corridor Project could finally be on the home stretch. The
empowered committee on BMICP, headed by chief secretary Sudhakar Rao, on Tuesday is understood to have
given the go-ahead to Nandi Infrastructure Corridor Enterprises (NICE) on pending works relating to the peripheral
road and expressway. This effectively means all administrative decks are cleared for the company.

Barring a few patches where land has not been made available by the government, NICE has completed major
portions of link and peripheral roads. With this green signal, NICE is all set to take up works in the bottlenecks.

Due to the Kumaraswamy government's numerous roadblocks, the BMIC project was entangled in a legal battle
for four years. The company even filed a contempt case in the Supreme Court against the state government for
disobeying its order on the case.

Unwilling to go against the SC order, governor Rameshwar Thakur's executive committee had issued an order
paving the way for completion of peripheral and link road, that had been stalled by the Kumaraswamy
government. Besides, the committee also asked Rao to take all necessary steps for early completion of the rest of
NICE's projects, including the expressway connecting Bangalore and Mysore.

The JD(S), as coalition partners of the Congress and the BJP, did everything possible to stop the project, but the
SC came to NICE's rescue. The government was rapped on five occasions by the Karnataka High Court and
Supreme Court in the past three years in the BMIC case.

Interestingly, the government during President's rule modified Kumaraswamy's cabinet decisions taken in August
2007, which proposed inviting global tenders to take up the BMIC project through the Swiss Challenge method.
However, the Supreme Court struck down this idea.

Before passing an order, the executive committee had taken note of NICE's core contention, which said the state
government was doing everything at its command to frustrate and defeat the various writs of mandamus issued by
the courts, with a view to kill the project contrary to the direction of the courts.

"We have completed 39.5 km of the total length of 41 km of peripheral road; 7.1 km of the 9.1 km of link road and
only 4.5 km of expressway. The remaining portions of the roads and the interchanges are incomplete owing to
non-availability of lands," NICE representative said.

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