The government will invite bids by this year-end for three mega projects worth around Rs 14,500 crore (Rs 145 billion) in the road sector, Road Transport and Highways Minister Kamal Nath said on Friday.
"We will invite bids for three mega projects by the end of this year, we are looking at mega projects in which each project for building 500 km of road will be worth $1 billion," Nath told reporters on the sidelines of the SIAM annual convention in New Delhi.
"We are going to put in place 11,000 km of roads worth Rs 1 lakh crore in 2009-10 under Work Plan I," Nath said, adding that challenges in capacity building will be addressed and all corrections will be made by September 30.
He said India's automobile industry should aim at producing 250 lakh (2.5 billion) vehicles by 2015 for which his ministry will build the necessary road network.
Earlier, he had said that 20 km of roads will be built in a day in the next two years amounting to an investment of Rs 2,00,000 crore (Rs 2,000 billion).
