IRB Infra order-book doubles to Rs 5, 000 cr.

IRB Infra order-book doubles to Rs 5, 000 cr.
• Bags lion's share of National Highway projects

IRB Infrastructure Developers Limited, a major player in the National Highway Development Project (NHDP), has doubled its order book position to over Rs 5,000 cr by bagging the 239 km-long Surat-Dahisar section of NHDP- Phase V.

With this, IRB Infrastructure emerges as one of the largest players in the National Highway Development Project having bagged projects running into 414 km which constitutes nearly 8% of the over 5,000-km National Highway project. IRB already has concession for the Mumbai-Pune Expressway (110 km) and Surat-Bharuch section (65 km).

The road and highway projects are also making IRB cash registers ring! IRB, in fact, currently is the largest toll tax road operator in the country collecting about Rs crore a day. It is like managing a banking operation by itself – collecting money from many toll plazas and depositing them with lender bank escrow accounts, analysts point out.

Interestingly, IRB Infrastructure's order book also more than doubles with the NHDP assignment which would involve a capex of over Rs 2,600 cr & o&m of around 1200 cr. As of June 30, 2007, the company had an order book position of Rs 2,386 cr.

Analysts say the sensible competitive bidding done by IRB Infrastructure demonstrates its project management skills and in-house execution capabilities. IRB Infrastructure offered a revenue share of 38% followed by L&T ( 35.21% ) and Reliance Energy (33.61%).

For the first time in the National Highway projects, the government has come out with a revenue sharing formula. Earlier the BOT projects were on a negative grant basis where in the bidder was to pay up the government the cost of the particular project. The bidder would recover the cost through officially approved toll fee as per user-pay formula. In fact, IRB Infrastructure also stands out as the highest payer of negative grant as they handed over a cheque for Rs 5.04 billion to the Prime Minister for the Surat-Bharuch section over a year ago.

NHDP-V, which is based on a unique revenue sharing basis, incidentally is likely to attract the largest private investment of over Rs 12,500 crores on the five projects mentioned here. It covers five sections – Surat-Dahisar (239 km), Gurgaon-Jaipur (225 km), Chennai-Tada in Tamil Nadu (42 km), Vijayawada-Chilkaluripet in AP (85 km) and Panipat-Jalandhar (291 km).
Of the other projects under NHDP Phase-V, ETA & KMC Constium won the Gurgaon-Jaipur section, L&T the Chennai-Tada section, IJM-IDFC JV the Vijayawada-Chilkaluripet section and Isolex-Korson-Soma bagged the Panipat-Jalandhar section.