Nagpur- Mumbai Expressway: ‘Small Towns Must Be Environmentally Friendly, Sustainable’; says Mopalwar

Former managing director of the Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation (MSRDC) Radheshyam Mopalwar, who recently also reigned as director-general for infrastructure projects by the government of Maharashtra, is widely credited with enabling the expeditious construction of the 701-km Nagpur to Mumbai Samruddhi Mahamarg. In a freewheeling conversation, the retired bureaucrat opened up about challenges, what makes this expressway stand out and what impact a high speed road can have on people's prosperity.

How has the Nagpur Mumbai Samruddhi Mahamarg positively impacted the lives of local people?
Communication is the key for everything—societies develop, countries develop only when there is efficient communication. We already have 50,000 kilometres of state highway, but what an expressway brings to the table is very fast communication from the agricultural hinterland to the consuming centre. Maharashtra is fortunate that almost 50% of the state is urbanised. The future of development is urbanisation, so the percentage of population dependent on agriculture needs to be drastically reduced. The contribution of agriculture to the GDP of the country is about 20%, and this percentage will keep going down, while the value of services, technologies will go up. And that is where the comforts of life are created.

Development necessarily means a higher level of comfort, even for the rural population. We have 300-plus towns, more and more people will move to these towns. No farmer wants to make his son a farmer, people are seeking non-farm employment, looking for a higher standard of life.
Through the Hindu Hrudaysamrat Balasaheb Thackeray Maharashtra Samruddhi Mahamarg, the hinterland gets connected to Mumbai, to JNPT which handles 65% of the country’s containerised cargo.  
Sixty percent of the state’s GDP comes from the triangle of Mumbai Metropolitan Region, Nashik and Pune metropolitan region. Connecting to this region makes people part of this value chain. If it takes 20 hours to go from Bhandara to Mumbai, then you don’t actually have connectivity and you have the same low level of income.
The idea of the Expressway is to enhance the level of income of the masses. That happens when there is speedy movement of goods, manpower, services. Also, we’re not only connecting these 10 districts that the Expressway crosses, but 14 other districts will be 20 minutes to 1 hour from the Expressway. The vision of the Maharashtra government is to ensure that every district is connected to an Expressway, and this entire grid gives you the capability to connect any two parts of the state in six to eight hours.

What Sustainable Development Goals did you have in mind during the planning of the Nagpur Mumbai Samruddhi Mahamarg?
The trigger was actually the goal to promote implementation of the SDGs. Sustainable development is basically taking development to all corners so that migration of people to Mumbai, Pune, Nashik is curbed. There is pressure on water sources, environment, etc in these cities.
There are 300 towns spread across the state. If even 50 of these become bigger urban centres, that would be more welcome. The focus should be on better urban development for these towns. When better practices in sanitation, water management, engineering are taken to smaller towns, you automatically make them more sustainable, more environment friendly and simultaneously enhancing the quality of life there. For example, towns such as Washim, Mehkar, Karanjala—if they develop in a different manner, then we’ll see that developing smaller towns reduces pressure on the metropolises.

Tell us about the Krishi Samruddhi towns along the Expressway.
When we started work in 2016, we decided that this would be the only highway where towns would be planned in advance. Wherever you create expressways or trunk infrastructure, at the exit points, some development takes place but not in a planned way. So you cannot actually realise their complete value. We decided to explore the possibilities of establishing new communities at these exits.
Rome was not built in a day, they say, and towns take decades to form and grow. In Maharashtra we have some experience with building new towns through CIDCO, towns that will not be haphazard, which create more value.
We identified 24 locations where new towns can come up based on the region, where the entire agricultural hinterland reinforces the value of the town, whether it is a logistics hub, a hub for academic institutions, etc. And these would be towns with better health facilities, a fire brigade, government services provided there, etc.

Eighteen towns were found feasible. We call them Krishi Samruddhi towns because we expect these towns to provide property to their agricultural hinterland. Eighteen towns are notified, and in eight we are already doing planning activities.
Land use plans, land acquisition, land pooling are being done, once anchor industries come, and basic facilities including roads, lights, water, gardens are delivered, then we expect that in the future you will have 18-20 excellent towns along the Expressway. The entire Expressway will also be a logistics corridor. The road does not stop at Nagpur. We have already notified the highway up to Gondia, and eventually this connects with highways all the way up to Kolkata. The Krishi Samruddhi towns will also be warehousing hubs for procurement of agro-produce, processing, packaging and distribution.  

What challenges were overcome in the initial stages?
Never before had 22,000 hectares of land running across 10 districts and 22 subdivisions been acquired in Maharashtra for a single project. These districts and regions had different cultures, even legacy issues in land laws, different in Vidarbha, Marathwada, and Western Maharashtra. The other, more difficult challenge was people not trusting. Land acquisition by government was not lucrative. When I was trained years ago, we always acquired for the government at the lowest price in the area, it was considered that this was for the larger good.

Then with the Land Acqui-sition law of 2013, we were looking at land acquisition at the market value, and a multiple of that. We went a step ahead for acquisition through consent of the owners promising five times the market value of the land. People did not have the experience of this kind of compensation and initially did not believe that the government will give such compensation.
Post-facto, people have realised that they were not displaced. If they lost land, they were able to purchase more land and still be left with surplus. That’s why it is called Samruddhi Mahamarg. Everybody whose land was acquired is better placed today than he was before 2018-19. What helped us sail though is effective communication, through a communications plan and team, a first of its kind. For each of over 390 villages where we acquired land, we appointed one person who could communicate to residents, clarify any issues, answer queries, etc. This was not an opaque transaction. We completed acquisition within 10-12 months and everybody believed that the government was delivering more than it promised.

How many jobs will the Samruddhi expressway create for local people?
See, it's important that local people are involved in job creation. We expect this stretch to create 500,000 jobs over a period of a few years. It is only local people who will get these jobs, because nobody is going to come from outside there. Investments will come in, manufacturing and logistics activities will take place and only local people will be employed in construction, management, back office, front office, in sales, etc. It’s not going to be skill sets that will be required to be brought in from outside.  

What care did MSRDC take to  ensure mitigation of impact of the highway on wildlife?  
It was necessary to communicate that the effort of the government was to be compliant with laws, with environmental concerns, forest conservation concerns, because there is a general perception that the government is callous, not bothered about compliances. And, this was the largest land acquisition project — in one stage, 700 km were constructed
We went to the Wildlife Institute of India and asked them to proactively suggest methods to mitigate the impact of the highway on the surroundings and also to monitor compliances.  
There are only two wildlife sanctuaries along the way, but Wildlife Institute decided to examine all 700 km. If we were recommended X number of steps, Wildlife Institute suggested X plus Y. We delivered X plus Y. They wanted us to do 100 more wildlife friendly structures, which we did, interventions that cost an additional Rs 350 crore. We not only complied with the book, we went beyond it.