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All hurdles cleared for NICE projects6 Aug 2008, 0542 hrs IST,TNN

BANGALORE: The Bangalore-Mysore Infrastructure Corridor Project could finally be on the home stretch. Theempowered committee on BMICP, headed by chief secretary Sudhakar Rao, on Tuesday is understood to havegiven the go-ahead to Nandi Infrastructure Corridor Enterprises (NICE) on pending works relating to the peripheralroad 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 majorportions 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 battlefor four years. The company even filed a contempt case in the Supreme Court against the state government fordisobeying its order on the case.

Unwilling to go against the SC order, governor Rameshwar Thakur's executive committee had issued an orderpaving the way for completion of peripheral and link road, that had been stalled by the Kumaraswamygovernment. Besides, the committee also asked Rao to take all necessary steps for early completion of the rest ofNICE'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 theSC came to NICE's rescue. The government was rapped on five occasions by the Karnataka High Court andSupreme Court in the past three years in the BMIC case.

Interestingly, the government during President's rule modified Kumaraswamy's cabinet decisions taken in August2007, 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 stategovernment was doing everything at its command to frustrate and defeat the various writs of mandamus issued bythe 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 andonly 4.5 km of expressway. The remaining portions of the roads and the interchanges are incomplete owing tonon-availability of lands," NICE representative said.

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