With marine drive, will Patna be the new maximum city?

Mumbaikars enjoy as huge waves lash against 
the water front on Marine Drive

NEW DELHI: Patna could soon get its own version of London's famed Thames Path or Mumbai's Marine Drive: a long, pleasant walk or drive on along the banks of the river Ganga.
At 40 km, Patna's Ganga driveway will be shorter than the Thames Path, which is 64 km long, but vastly longer than Marine Drive, which stretches a mere 3 km along the shore of the Arabian Sea.
The finance ministry and Planning Commission have cleared the project, which will cost 2,400 crore. Land for the project has come at little cost: the Ganga has altered its course leaving spare land in its wake.
"The project has been conceived well and can change the transport situation there," said a finance ministry official confirming the approval to the project. The finance ministry will have to cough up about 600 crore as viability gap funding for the project.
Part of the road, about 7 km in length, will run on an elevated platform. It could be a game changer for Bihar's capital city, which has only one viaduct over the river Ganga that is heavily congested.
Along its length, it will have pleasant boulevards and jetties for boats to berth. Planners believe this will improve not just physical infrastructure, but also the aesthetics of the city.
In the first phase, the Ganga driveway will connect Digha to Didarganj, a stretch of 21 km, and the second phase will go all the way to Fatua, a distance of 18 km.
The project was conceived by Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar as part of the vision 2021 document for the state and is expected to get environmental clearances soon.
Initial feasibility studies have given a thumbs-up to the project, said Bihar Road Construction Department Secretary Pratya Amrit.
"We have received positive feedback on the project, (and) 90% of the land is already with the government to ensure fast implementation," Amrit told ET. A large part of the structure is proposed to be built on reclaimed land already in government possession for which revenue records have been verified. The law says land emerging as a result of a change in a river's course belongs to the state. The state government has already held pre-bid conferences with investors and is confident of the private sector's response. The project is to be implemented in public-partnership mode on build-operate-transfer basis. "The private sector's response to the project has been overwhelming. We will invite RFQs by November-end," Amrit said.
The project, if bid out successfully, would be another in a series of successes the state has had in attracting investments in road projects. In July, the state received nod for its first toll project in the road sector. The 1,602-crore project to build a 5.5-km bridge over Ganga, connecting Bakhtiyarpur with Shahpur, along with a four-lane 45.5-km approach road has already achieved financial closure. The second is a 917-crore project to widen the two-lane road between Ara and Mohania to make it a four-lane road. The state witnessed a growth of 8.8% in the length of roads between 2003 and 2008, almost double the national average of 4.4%. It has constructed 23,606 km of roads since 2006-07, apart from augmenting and repairing 1,657 km of national highways.