Infrastructure

Union Minister for Social Justice & Empowerment, Shri Thaawarchand Gehlot e-inaugurated the new building of National Institute of Social Defence (NISD) Sector-10, Dwarka, New Delhi today. In his inaugural address, Shri Gehlot said that NISD is the nodal training and research institute in the field of social defence which focuses on human resource development for drug abuse prevention, welfare of senior citizens and transgenders, beggary prevention, and other social defence issues.

The National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) has set the timeline for 23 new highways, including a network of expressways and economic corridors, which will be ready by March 2025. Four expressways, including Delhi-Mumbai, Ahmedabad-Dholera and Amritsar-Jamnagar are scheduled for completion by March 2023. Nine more will be ready by March 2024.

Joka-Esplanade Metro will be India’s first Metro to run on indigenously manufactured rail. The first lot of the rails reached Joka depot on Monday. Hitherto, all the Metros in India have been running on imported rails as Indian steel companies did not produce these head hardened (HH) rails, which are used for high speed trains (>250 kmph), heavy traffic of varying axle loads for freights and Metro rail.

Tata Projects, an infrastructure major, said it along with its consortium partner has completed 110-km stretch of the 200-km Surathani-Phuket transmission line project in Thailand.

The country’s deepest underground rail ventilation shaft equal to a 15 storey building and an important part of the city’s East-West Metro line was completed on Monday, officials said.

India is considering investing Rs 10,000 crore for building a transshipment port at Great Nicobar Island in the Bay of Bengal to provide shippers an alternative to similar ports in the region, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Monday as he inaugurated the first undersea optical fibre project to provide high-speed internet to Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad, Union Minister of Electronics &IT, Communications and Law & Justice, said that Government of India has been taking measures on priority to provide connectivity in the far flung, difficult, border areas of strategic importance, so as to ensure better quality of life to the people as well as to those who are working in these areas.

Vice president M Venkaiah Naidu laid the foundation stone of the residential complex via video-conferencing on Monday.