And to ensure the specialist toll collection company, Intertoll of South Africa, doesn't shortchange anyone, rumble strips on the road will, on the basis of the weight put on them, actually tell a neighbouring computer terminal just how cars, trucks, buses or two-wheelers used the bridge that day.

And if you think that's too long to wait to see this high-tech bridge in operation, just go to the site, past Maharani Bagh in the Capital, to see high-tech at work. No moving of earth by trucks for this 6-kilometre long 8-lane bridge which costs Rs 400 crore. Since a total of 22 lakh cubic meters of earth have to be cleared from the Yamuna basin, this would mean thousands ofadditional trucks moving back and forth on Delhi's roads, a traffic and environmental nightmare. So, Mitsui Marubeni Corporation of Japan, the prime contractors for the bridge, have got huge dredgers to suck the sand and water along the river's basin. The sand is used for the bridge's embankment, the water's sent back.

Noida Toll Bridge Company is using innovative means to build this bridge. ``We are using technology that's applied for building artificial ports to ensure that the river water does not wash away the sand used for the embankment, even in the event of a flood,'' says G Viswanathan, Senior Vice-President, Noida Toll Bridge Company.

The country's first build-own-operate-transfer (BOOT) bridge is being built by the NOIDA Toll Bridge Company at an estimated cost of Rs 408 crore. Noida Toll Bridge Company is currently in the market with a public issue of fully convertible debentures and deep discount bonds worth Rs 71 crore. The cost of building the bridge, of course, will be recovered bycollecting tolls, that would range from Rs 5 in the case of two-wheelers to Rs 15 for a car.

So, a fifth of the construction's already complete, and no one's any the wiser since there's no pollution, no noise or disturbance. A separate casting yard, with noise barriers, for the bridge has been put up in Sector 15 A in Noida, far from the main bridge itself. A citizen's committee, in fact, has been set up to monitor the environment management plan, and the independent Shriram Institute of Industrial Research submits monthly reports on various parameters such as ambient air quality, dust and noise pollution levels, and whether the ground water levels are being affected by the bridge construction -- SIIR chooses any two days in a month to do the tests at random.

And while the Prime Minister's ambitious north-south-east-west corridor still appears too unviable to take off -- the PMO, though, is brushing it up for re-presentation -- and the government has all but given up on its plans for the super highways,India's roads privatisation programme looks as if may just have gathered steam. According to Abhijit Bhaumik, managing director of infrastructure project management firm Feedback Infrastructure, by-pass and bridge projects worth around Rs 10,000 crore are being executed right now, in the sense that they have either been tendered out already or are very close to this.

A Jaipur-Kishenganj 90-km stretch was four-laned just 6 months ago, and the toll road cuts travel time from Delhi's National Highway 8 to Jaipur to a mere two-and-a-half hours. And the Gujarat government in partnership with the Infrastructure Leasing and Financial Services (ILFS) is currently working on six-laning a two-lane highway from Vadodara to Halol in Gujarat -- that is expected to be completed over the next few months. Interestingly, Jaipur-Kishenganj and Vadodara-Halol are both on the eventual Delhi-Mumbai highway -- in effect therefore, the more viable parts of the highway are what are being bid out to private parties.

FeedbackVentures, the parent firm of Bhaumik's Feedback Infrastructure, is doing the four-laning of the Chandigarh-Ludhiana highway and expects the toll road to be operational in the year 2001. Bhaumik's firm is also working with the Punjab government and, by December, hopes to be able to bid out seven roadway projects which will cost Rs 1,000 crore.