Photo:Bhagya Prakash K.

FOR A BETTER TOMORROW: Prime Minister Manamohan Singh, Union Minister for Road Transport and Highways T.R. Baalu, Chief Minister H. D. Kumaraswamy(left) in Bangalore on Saturday .

BANGALORE: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Saturday laid the foundation stone for the Rs. 450-crore 9.9-km 10-lane mixed corridor to Electronics City on National Highway 7 here, undertaken by the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI), calling it the latest milestone in the "road revolution" that India is now witnessing.

Dr. Singh, who shared his dream of an India "in which everyone can move along the same highway", said the corridor to Electronics City was a symbol of what Bangalore had come to represent. "You are on the highway of rapid progress in our country, while many other regions continue to remain behind. It is through your success, hard work, creativity and enterprise that you inspire all of us," he added.In a bid to dispel the false notion that development was a question of conflict between city and village, Dr. Singh listed several initiatives of the Union Government to provide world-class road connectivity around Bangalore.

The United Progressive Alliance Government had speeded up the construction and development of national highways. The programme had been expanded and funding steeply increased. "We now have a road programme under the National Highways Development Project (NHDP) estimated at over Rs. 2,20,000 crore to be completed in the next seven to eight years," Dr. Singh said.

Dr. Singh said the NHDP had expanded from two phases to seven, covering most parts of the country. NHDP III, with investment of Rs. 55,000 crore, would see improved networking of 11,000 km of high-density highways connecting State capitals and important centres of tourism and economic activity. The most significant feature of these projects was that they were being developed largely through a public-private partnership mode, he said.

Dr. Singh wanted Bangalore's IT sector to share the credit for the city's emergence as a global brand.

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