Bangalore Development Authority (BDA) on Tuesday (September 3) issued a public notice to acquire 19.75 acres of land for building a toll plaza on the proposed Peripheral Ring Road (PRR). BDA has asked these property owners to claim ownership of these lands and submit objections, if any, over the next 15 days. This public notice comes nearly a month after BDA issued a similar public notice to acquire 71 acres of land for four interchanges in July.
Even as the BDA is moving ahead with issuing public notices to acquire land, farmers who were notified about the acquisition of their lands for the PRR project as far back as 2005 and who have challenged the same in the High Court are raising questions over the same.
“We have challenged the validity of this project as the main notification of the project has already lapsed. Unless the High Court decides this issue, BDA cannot execute these bits and pieces of the project like toll plazas and interchanges,” said Krishna Ramesh, a farmer whose land was notified for the project in 2005. He also wondered whether BDA had the financial resources to acquire their lands, give them adequate compensation, and execute the PRR project.
Raising loans
Senior BDA officials said after two tender calls failed to attract bidders for the project, the State government had now dropped the plan and has now decided to build PRR on its own.
Senior officials in the BDA said the authority is now mulling over raising a large loan from international agencies to fund both the cost of land acquisition and building the road. Earlier, the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) had approved a loan of ₹3,800 crore to build the road, but the State government was supposed to fund land acquisition costs, which became prohibitive.
Cross-subsidy model
While the toll levied on the road would be enough and provided as a guarantee for the loan to build the road, that wouldn’t be enough to raise a loan to fund land acquisition cost for the project, which is expected to be around ₹20,000 crore. To fix this problem, there is a new proposal to reduce the right of way of the road from the proposed 100 metres to around 60 metres and commercially develop the remaining land to cross-subsidise the project and pay back the loan. However, a senior BDA official said that the state cabinet would take a decision on this.
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