National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) has selected Hindustan Construction Company (HCC) Concessions for the six-laning of a stretch along the Vadodara-Surat section of national highway (NH) 8 in Gujarat, India.

The Rs8bn ($151.9m) project will also include the construction of a four-lane extra dosed bridge across the Narmada river in Gujarat.

HCC will undertake work on a design, build, finance, operate and transfer (DBFOT) basis, under the National Highways Development Project (NHDP) Phase V. Concession time for the project is 12 years, which includes 30 months of construction.

The 192km to 198km Vadodara-Surat section on NH8, which connects Delhi and Mumbai, is among the final stretches to be expanded into a six-lane highway and is an important corridor of the Golden Quadrilateral, connecting two major cities of Gujarat to Mumbai and other parts of the country.

The project will remove a bottleneck and ease congestion along the Maharashtra-Gujarat border, which carries traffic from the ports of Dahej and Hazira, as well as industrial traffic from Ankleshwar, Bharuch, regions of Surat and special economic zones (SEZ) in Dahej.

The project will be the company’s seventh; its portfolio includes six other NHAI concession projects, five toll-based projects and an annuity project.

HCC Concessions is a subsidiary of Hindustan Construction Company Infrastructure, which serves in the areas of water, power and transportation, and is in turn a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hindustan Construction Company Group, an engineering and construction company.