The highways body has lined up 30 National Highway sections as part of the plan, with the 124-km Trichy-Thuvarankurichi-Madurai (Tamil Nadu) section being the longest and the 4.4-km Badarpur elevated corridor in Delhi being the shortest in the list.
Sources did not immediately share the amount of money NHAI is looking to raise in FY24 through asset monetisation.
However, under the Centre’s ₹6 lakh-crore National Monetisation Pipeline (NMP) spread over four years from 2021-22 to 2024-25, operational highway stretches have the highest share of ₹1.6 lakh crore.
NHAI had targeted to monetise 14 highway sections covering 1,750.14 km in 2022-23. As of date, it has realised ₹10,367.77 crore in FY23 from 487.7 km of road assets.
“The value aimed to be unlocked through asset monetisation in the current year (FY23) has been achieved,” a senior NHAI official told ET, adding that the road sections had been selected this year on the basis of assured traffic visibility.
The asset monetisation will help manage NHAI’s debt that had ballooned to ₹3.5 lakh crore at the end of 2021-22. “There is hardly a secondary market available in the build operate transfer (BOT) road asset space and the only assets visible are in NHAI InvIT and TOT programmes, so we are very bullish about the assets that are being put up,” said Zafar Khan, vice president of Highway Operators Association (India), an industry body.