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| India4u News | |
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World News
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by_emR3 SaVSaK.CoM
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Posted online: Tuesday, December 13, 2005 at 12:39:16 PM
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Malaysia is prepared to invest $2-3 billion in developing India's road and other infrastructure if New Delhi agrees to its proposal to build about 3,000 km of freeways and highways connecting major cities, Works Minister S. Samy Vellu said.
Vellu, a minister for 26 years - something of a record - and the seniormost representative of the Malaysian Indian community in the government, said 70 percent of the investment could come from Kazana, the government's investing arm that would then open an office in India, while the remaining could come from the Indian government and from toll collection.
"It will be an invest, build, operate and transfer project worth about 8-10 billion ringgits ($2-3 billion), the like of which no country has proposed before," Vellu told IANS in an interview shortly before he made a presentation to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
Vellu said the clearance of such a network of freeways - between Delhi and Kolkata, one connecting Chenna-Kochi-Bangalore and between Mumbai and Bhopal - would open up the floodgates of investment and development and accelerate economic growth in the areas around it.
He said he had first made the proposal to late prime minister P.V. Narasimha Rao when he came here in the early 1990s, but "India was not then ready for such freeways".
But it is a changed India now, Vellu said, and he hoped the present Congress-led coalition government would clear it expeditiously to build on the rapidly growing political and economic relationship between the countries.
Among the other mega projects that Malaysian companies were doing in India were an 300-million ringgit ($80-million) conference centre in the heart of the Indian capital for which it has a signed a deal with the New Delhi Municipal Council. The project would include the eventual construction of the tallest building in the capital as well.
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