Centre holds the right to notify any land and acquire it for Highway

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The Centre is “fully competent” to notify “any land (not necessarily an existing road/highway) for acquisition, to construct a highway to be a national highway” and prior environmental clearance is not necessary at the stage of notification of land acquisition proceedings. Supreme Court ruled while upholding the notifications issued under the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) Act, 1956, for acquisition of land for construction of the eight-lane Chennai-Krishnagiri-Salem national highway.

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• A bench comprising of Justices AM Khanwilkar, BR Gavai and Krishan Murari allowed the Centre go ahead with Rs 10,000 crore Chennai-Krishnagiri-Salem eight-lane express way under the "Bharatmala Pariyojana".
• The court said, “provisions in the Constitution unambiguously indicate that the legislative as well as executive power regarding all matters concerning and connected with a highway to be designated as a national highway, vests in Parliament, and the laws to be made by it in that regard. For the same reason, the complete executive power also vests within the Union.”
• The Central Government is free to construct/build a new national highway keeping in mind the obligations it has to discharge under Part IV of the Constitution for securing a social order and promotion of welfare of the people in the concerned region, to provide them adequate means of livelihood, distribute material resources as best to subserve the common good, create new opportunities, so as to empower the people of that area including provisioning new economic opportunities in the area through which the national highway would pass and the country’s economy as a whole.
• The project had come under challenge on grounds that the notification issued under Section 3(A) of the NHAI Act could only have been done after environmental clearance.
• It was also contended that the Centre could not acquire open green fields for construction of national highway, and that only a preexisting state highway could be declared as such.

Bharatmala Project

Bharatmala Pariyojana (Project) is a centrally-sponsored and funded Road and Highways project of the Government of India.

The total investment for 83,677 km committed new highways is estimated at 5.35 lakh crore, making it the single largest outlay for a government road construction scheme (as of December 2017).

The project will build highways from Gujarat, Rajasthan, Punjab, Haryana and then cover the entire string of Himalayan states - Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand - and then portions of borders of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar alongside Terai, and move to West Bengal, Sikkim, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, and right up to the Indo-Myanmar border in Manipur and Mizoram.

Special emphasis will be given on providing connectivity to far-flung border and rural areas including the tribal and backward areas.

Bharatmala Project will interconnect 550 District Headquarters through a minimum 4-lane highway by raising the number of corridors to 50 (from current 6) and move 80% freight traffic (40% currently) to National Highways by interconnecting 24 logistics parks, 66 inter-corridors (IC) of total 8,000 km, 116 feeder routes (FR) of total 7,500 km and 7 north east Multi-Modal waterway ports.

The ambitious umbrella programme will subsume all existing Highway Projects including the flagship National Highways Development Project (NHDP), launched by the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government in 1998.

It is both enabler and beneficiary of other key Government of India schemes, such as Sagarmala, Dedicated Freight Corridors, Industrial corridors, UDAN-RCS, BharatNet, Digital India and Make in India.