Chief Minister for monitoring of roads with drones

Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu took a decision to entrust the maintenance of 4,000 km of State highways to private companies for a period of five years. He instructed the officials of the Roads and Buildings (R&B) Department to monitor the condition of roads in the State with the help of drones to get repairs done on the basis of the real time information provided by the devices.

The R&B officials told the CM that it was targeted to expand 4,000 km of major roads in the districts in the next five years and construct 120 bridges in the place of dilapidated ones. Besides, it has been resolved to covert 1,810 km of roads into BT roads at an estimated cost of ₹1,580 crore by 2021-22.

The officials also told Mr. Naidu that a 300-metre bridge was being built on the Sileru river as a component of the Chintur-Motu inter-State highway at a cost of ₹24 crore and the State highways would be named as SH-1 and SH-2 on the lines of the nomenclature of national highways.

Mr. Naidu directed the officials to speed up land acquisition for the construction of the Amaravati-Anantapur Express Highway. He enquired about the status of expansion of the national highways into six lanes between Narasannapet-Ranasthalam, Chittoor-Mallavaram, Anandapuram-Pendurthy - Anakapalli, Renigunta-Naidupet and four lanes between Gundugolanu-Kovvur and Mydukur - Badvel - Nellore.

Benz Circle flyover

He suggested to the officials to get the Machilipatnam - Bhimavaram and Machilipatnam - Eluru highways under the Central government’s Bharatmala project.

The CM ordered the R&B officials to divert the vehicular traffic between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. from the road abutting the Benz Circle flyover to the other lane to facilitate its speedy construction. He also wanted the Kanaka Durga flyover construction to be completed by the end of January 31, 2019, and expressed anger at Soma Developers for the delay in its execution.