The lowest bid received was 12.72 per cent less than the estimated cost, as a result of which the UPEIDA will be able to save Rs 1,131.74 crore.

The expressway project will be implemented under the Engineering, Procurement and Construction (EPC) model.

In the EPC model, the contractor is responsible for designing the project, procurement of material required to build it and its construction, after which the project is delivered to the end-user.

The access-controlled expressway will have a right of way (total land area acquired for the construction of the roadway) of 110 metres. A service road, 3.75 metres wide, will also be constructed on one side of the expressway.

A total of four rail overbridges, 14 large bridges, six toll plazas, seven ramp plazas, 266 small bridges, and 18 flyovers will be constructed on the expressway.

The construction of the expressway, however, has seen some delay. In November 2019, UPEIDA officials told this correspondent in Lucknow that the construction of the expressway was likely to begin in December 2019.

At one point, it was reported that Prime Minister Modi will lay the foundation for the project in January 2020. However, this did not happen until today.

“We want to finish work on the expressway by the end of 2021 or, maximum, in the early months of 2022,” a UPEIDA official had said back in November.



However, it is not clear if the delay will lead to a change in this plan. UP goes to polls in 2022 and the Adityanath government would want the expressway, or at least its main carriageway, to be up and running before the elections.

Bundelkhand is electorally important for the BJP — of the 19 Vidhan Sabha seats in the seven districts that form Uttar Pradesh’s part of Bundelkhand, the party had won all 19 in 2017.

In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the party had won all the four seats in the region, repeating its performance of the 2014 polls.

Bundelkhand Defence Corridor

The expressway is important for one more reason — the proposed Bundelkhand Defence Corridor, a flagship project of Chief Minister Adityanath to attract investment in this region.

It is no coincidence that this year, the Defence Expo, a bi-annual exhibition of defence equipment and technology, was organised by the Ministry of Defence in state capital Lucknow.

Uttar Pradesh already has three Hindustan Aeronautics Limited manufacturing units, nine Ordnance Factories, Bharat Electronics Limited and other state-owned companies that are part of the defence sector.

Most of these plants are in Lucknow, Kanpur and the adjoining regions, which are within the 300-350 km radius of Bundelkhand.



In recent years, Kanpur has attracted investment in defence manufacturing from the private sector. Recently, the Lohia Group invested nearly Rs 100 crore in a greenfield aerospace and defence hardware plant in Kanpur.

MKU, a defence manufacturing firm headquartered in Kanpur has been supplying equipment to the Indian Army since the last 1980s, and to militaries, paramilitaries and police services in other countries as well.

Among other things, the company is manufacturing ballistic helmets for the Indian Army at its unit Malwan in Uttar Pradesh’s Fatehpur district, a 40-minute drive away from Kanpur, and a little over 130 km away from Chitrakoot, one of the six nodes (Aligarh, Agra, Jhansi, Kanpur and Lucknow being the other five) proposed under the Bundelkhand Defence Industrial Corridor project.