The state is tapping money with its expats to build two highways worth Rs.10,000 crore from north to south
The Left Democratic Front (LDF) government in Kerala is betting big on highway construction, having put together a couple of financial instruments to harness the savings of its 20 lakh expats across Gulf countries. On its to-do list are two projects worth Rs 10,000 crore, with Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan affirming that the highways spanning the state from north to south would be commissioned by December, 2020. The Rs 3,500-crore hill highway would be 1,267 km in length and connect Nandrappadavu in Kasargod district in the north to Parassala in Thiruvananthapuram in the south. Traversing the state’s hill ranges, it would span 13 of Kerala’s 14 districts. The Rs 6,500-crore coastal highway, the second project, would be 630 km long and stretch from Poovar in Thiruvananthapuram to Kunjathoor in Kasargod, spanning nine of the 14 districts. Ensuring easy connectivity to the state’s ports like Vallarpadam, Vizhinjam and Kollam, it is expected to ease cargo movement and fisheries development.
What’s unique to this highway-building programme is the funding mechanism, with the Kerala Infrastructure Investment Fund Board (KIIFB), the state’s infra fund pool, tapping a new chit fund programme named Pravasi Chitty. “We target getting the chit fund subscribed by at least one-lakh NRIs in the first year, so that we can mobilise the Rs 10,000 crore needed for the highways,” says State Finance Minister TM Thomas Isaac, the brain behind the funding programme. “Since infrastructure creation is a priority, we expect to raise not less than Rs 50,000 crore through this mechanism. It’s a two-pronged move of empowering Gulf returnees through financial support for their ventures in Kerala and raising funds for infrastructure,” he says.
Non-resident Keralites (NRKs) can make their monthly remittance through any of the payment gateways. The investments would have the guarantee of the state government. The state convened a conclave of its expats, a first-of-its-kind diaspora parliament called Loka Kerala Sabha, earlier this month. “More than funds, the meet was about pooling expertise in various fields, including construction and project management,” says MA Yussufali, chairman of the Abu Dhabi-based Lulu Group. For the 418.5-km first phase (from Kasargod to Palakkad) of the hill highway project, “technical sanction should be ready by March,” says G Sudhakaran, the public works minister. “The hill highway would serve as a market-connector, pepping up the rural economy,” says Jose Dominique, CEO, the CGH Group of luxury hotels.
In what augurs well for deadlines, the two projects would not necessitate enormous levels of land acquisition, since, except for a few missing links, roads exist that connect the entire hinterland. On the state government’s outreach for fund generation, Gita Gopinath, John Zwaanstra professor of international studies and economics at Harvard University and financial advisor to Kerala CM, says, “even as Kerala is going through a transient resource crunch, there is a big, broad vision to swiftly go ahead with development, rolling out off-budget schemes.”
