Bharat Rakshak

krishnan wrote:agree with Singha , chennai beaches are mostly horrible , and can hardly call them beaches. They should first do away with those shops

Bade wrote:Saar did you read...NH-17 is under NHAI not GoK afaik.

Bade wrote:Saar did you read...NH-17 is under NHAI not GoK afaik. I have been on State highways to avoid the mess of NH-17 and NH-47 multiple times and they are smoother than Hema Malini's cheeks.

Bade wrote:Sachin, yes LA is not done in some stretches, so they have a technical excuse for those segments. But for the bridge like the one over Periyar into North Parur from the Trichur district side, they have been collecting toll since I was a teenager. The new bridge came up when I was in Pre-degree and was not complete till I left the state. The road condition there has been so-so at the best of times to large potholes soon after the monsoons.

SanjayC wrote:^^^ Did you factor in the land cost?

muraliravi wrote:

SanjayC wrote:^^^ Did you factor in the land cost?

Thats a good question, so when we read that 1 km of a 4/6 lane highway costs xx crores, does that usually include land or not?

Suraj wrote: Such quoted costs are construction costs; land price is a variable, while construction costs are usually predictable based on type of road and # of lanes, for a generally uniform topological route. Nothing wrong with that total price including land acquisition costs.

Marten wrote:We need roads like Naypyidaw! 12 lanes to help reach out 40 years into the future.
Might as well get the acquisition in place for the HSR at the same time! It should actually help if feeder roads/highways are accounted for during this period. Doing this in phases might offset the cost, but land acquisition being what it is these days, would make sense planning the rail alignments too right now.

krishnan wrote:obviously it will include land cost , unless it runs into govt owned land, even then they will have to pay some compensation

The quickening spread

“THE city is old,” says Dhakshinamoorthy Dhinakaran, a property developer who has built a gated development of two-storey houses 35km south-west of Chennai and 15km from Lakewood Enclave. He has a point. Chennai is a scruffy place. The British, who called it Madras, left it with few grand buildings, and some of those it once boasted were subsequently razed in favour of shopping centres or new digs for Tamil Nadu’s politicians. Many buildings look older than they are, and not in a good way—they have been corroded by hot sun and humid air. The sewers overflow when it rains. But outside Chennai, a new India is rising.

The roads out of the city are lined with half-finished four- and five-storey apartment blocks, most with man-sized figurines lashed to concrete pillars to ward off superstitious trespassers. Behind them, tidy family houses and high-rise apartment buildings are going up. Every other billboard seems to advertise new homes.

Chennai is spreading less because its inhabitants are desperate to leave the old city than because their jobs have moved. Carmakers have built factories outside the city, and workers have followed. Information technology has grown to the south. The World Bank calculates that, between 1998 and 2005, the number of IT jobs within 25km of the centre of Chennai increased by 27%. In the same period, 47% more IT jobs were added in an outer ring between 25km and 50km from Chennai. In high-tech manufacturing, the urban core lost about a quarter of its workers, while the outer ring gained 23% more jobs.

The biggest and most spectacular IT campus in Tamil Nadu belongs to Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). It looks like Optimus Prime taking a nap. The 60,000 people inside the Transformer lookalike do back-office tasks for Western firms and governments. One of them, taking a lunch break, is Karbagam Chandrasekaran. She lives at home with her parents in Chennai, and takes a bus to the campus each day—a journey of about an hour and a half. She likes city living for its convenience, but has heard that the schools are better in the suburbs, and would prefer to live closer to work. When she marries (young Indians almost always say “when”, not “if”) she expects to move out, particularly if her husband also works in the IT corridor.

More than 225 TCS buses run to and from campus every day, many of them carrying workers to and from homes in the old city. Other IT firms do the same, with the result that traffic jams towards Chennai in the evening are often worse than the jams in the opposite direction. But this is changing. Ravi Viswanathan, TCS’s president for growth markets, says that new employees are more likely to live in the suburbs. Buildings are newer, rents are lower and well-regarded private schools have appeared, along with new hospitals and restaurants. At the weekend, Mr Viswanathan says, the main roads around TCS’s campus used to be almost deserted except for cattle. Now they are thick with cars and motorbikes.

Around 6,000-7,000 kms of non-sensitive roads in border areas will be handed over to the National Highways Authority of India, Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar said.

Incidentally, BRO has failed to meet the deadlines in 73 strategic road projects on the India-China border, cleared by the Cabinet Committee on Security in June 2006.

The deadline to complete the 3,500-km road build up was 2012. But so far only over 500 kms of roads have been built, and the deadline has been extended to 2016.

Haresh wrote:India to plant 2 BILLION trees along its highways, creating jobs for 300,000 youths

http://www.treehugger.com/environmental ... hways.html

Bade wrote:Why do we need trees along the highways ? At most shrubs in the median is what is essential to block incoming traffic lights, which is not the safest design option for high speed carriageways.

Trees were planted in old days to provide for shade for walkers and slow moving carts.

matrimc wrote:By the way same with lawns too. They are eco-friendly. But one needs to consider the water footprint vs. carbon footprint reduction.