Taking the Karnataka government to task, the Supreme Court today cleared the Rs 2,250 crore Bangalore-Mysore four-lane express highway project and imposed exemplary costs of Rs 5 lakh on the state government for bringing the issue before it.

Upholding the Karnataka High Court judgment, which had favoured the continuance of the Bangalore-Mysore Infrastructure Corridor (BMIC) project—The Indian Express last year highlighted how H D Deve Gowda and his party, then part of the Dharam Singh coalition, had put up roadblocks in the project—a bench comprising Justice Ruma Pal, Justice B N Srikrishna and Justice Dalveer Bhandari said “the entire appeal was with malafide intention”.

“There was no merit in the appeal filed by the Karnataka government and others. They came out with frivolous arguments against the project,” said Justice Srikrishna, pronouncing the judgment for the bench.

The project, the judges said, was “in the larger public interest of the state... we find that the HC judgment is not liable to be interfered with.”

The court said the Rs 5 lakh costs imposed on the Karnataka government and its institutions will be paid to Nandi Infrastructure Corridor Enterprise Ltd (NICE), the developer which had entered into an agreement with the state in 1997 for executing the project.

The bench also imposed a cost of Rs 50,000 on JD(U) MLA J C Madhuswami and Rama Reddy of the CPI and others who had appealed against the HC judgment of May 3, 2005.

To save own chair, Dharam let Gowda block BMIC

In October 2005, The Indian Express did a series on Bangalore’s Lost Expressway:

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