Islamabad: The National Highway Authority (NHA) is to start five different road infrastructure projects under private-public partnership at an estimated cost of PKR 1.83 billion, reported a news source. More prominent of these projects include Peshawar-Nowshehra Expressway, conversing of Karachi Bypass into a four-land wide motorway.
In order to make the far flung areas of Pakistan more accessible via roads, the NHA has lately started to encourage initiation of these projects under private-public partnerships. For this purpose, the authority has also set up a dedicated Private-Public Partnership Cell in its head office. At this cell, the investors are briefed on the process of land acquisition for highways and motorways and the legalities involved in it.
Among the five mega-projects initiated in the last fiscal year, four were operated under a private-public partnership mode, including the modernisation of a 357-kilometre long Lahore Islamabad Motorway, and the construction of Karachi-Hyderabad Motorway, Lahore-Sialkot Motorway, and Hyderabad-Sukkur Motorway.
The recent projects include the 70-kilometre long Sialkot-Kharian Motorway, 115-kilometre long Kharian-Rawalpindi Motorway, 294-kilometre long Multan-Pindi Bhattian Motorway, 43-kilometre long Nowshehra-Peshawar Expressway, and the project to convert the 50-kilometre long Karachi Northern Bypass into a 4-lane wide motorway.
