Adventz Group's Texmaco Rail & Engineering has been awarded a Rs 2 billion project, to construct the 45-km dual-gauge line between Agartala in Tripura and Akhaura, a sub-district of Chittagong in Bangladesh.

Chairman Anil Ambani-led Reliance Infrastructure (RInfra) is on a winning spree. The company recently bagged the Versova-Bandra Sea Link project in Mumbai from the Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation at a massive Rs 70-billion.

The last two decades have witnessed massive highway infrastructure development in the country, primarily undertaken under the National Highways Development Project (NHDP) programme, which was started in 1998.

In the last few years, India has seen a rising demand for infrastructural development, in particular, owing to the increasing urban population of the country.

The Ministry of Road Transportation & Highways (MORTH) has fixed a lower award target of around 20,000 km of National Highways for FY2019 from 25,000 km in FY2018.

"We are due to see a surge in construction rates in India as it overtakes Japan to become the world's third largest construction market by 2021," says Graham Robinson, Executive Director, Global Construction Perspectives.

Tendering and awarding projects picked up only after the sanction of ambitious Bharatmala programme and subsequent new procedure for sanction being put in place in November 2017. As reported, during this drive, post Bharatmala, 232 projects were put on tenders involving around 11,200 km of road length costing more than Rs 1,960 billion.

Awarding of highway construction projects rocketed 70 per cent to an all-time annual high in fiscal 2018, spanning ~7,400 km and valued at Rs 1.2 lakh crore, data from the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) showed.

Sterling and Wilson has evolved to become India's leading MEP contracting company, having integrated its various offerings and services under a single MEP entity. All five services -electrical, HVAC, fire-fighting, plumbing and IBMS - have been successfully incorporated into a single business unit, which has an order intake of about Rs 16 billion today.