India's border roads to get vast improvement by 2014-15

The Border Roads Organisation (BRO) on November 4 said that India's highways infrastructure along the borders would undergo a massive change by 2014-15 with completion of about 2,000 road projects initiated in 2007.

The BRO's Director General Lt General S Ravi Shankar said that by 2014-15, you will see a magic change on frontier infrastructure.

At present seventy per cent progress has been made in projects initiated in 2007. These will be completed by 2014-15. The BRO, combining both big and small schemes, is working on more than 2,000 road schemes along the borders at present through 18 projects including Beacon, Arunank, Brahmank and Dantak for which it has a budgetary provision of about Rs 5,000 crore for a year.

The organisation is set to construct up to 800 small and big bridges, totalling a length of 35 km in the next five years. The cost of each bridge may range from Rs 6 lakh to Rs 10 lakh depending on terrain, he said.

The BRO has for now completed about 50,000 km of roads and 40,000 metres of bridges, he added. Among the challenging works being executed by BRO include 592-metre long cable stayed Basholi bridge in Jammu & Kashmir over the river Ravi about 15 km upstream of the Ranjit Sagar dam.