TN Plans 142-km Six-Lane Highway Linking Chennai to Vellore Industrial Corridors

The Tamil Nadu Highways Department is all set to introduce a six-lane access-controlled highway from Chennai to Vellore, offering rapid-surfacing connections between southern suburbs in Chennai to western districts, along with freight mobility for industries.

This highway would be built for pretty much 135-142 km in length and would commence from the under-construction Chennai Peripheral Ring Road (CPRR) near Oragadam and terminate at NH38 in the Vellore district. More importantly, a 68-km stretch would connect just the CPRR at Oragadam with Mangal Koot Road near Cheyyar SIPCOT.

This proposed corridor is expected to play an important role in connecting key industrial zones along it, linking Oragadam, various automobile and manufacturing units, with Cheyyar SIPCOT, a major base for auto and electronics industries, and a planned SIPCOT industrial park on NH38 in Vellore, the exact site of which is yet to be finalized.

According to the officials, the project has been conceived with a partially greenfield alignment, with a view to establishing a direct, high-speed access between the industrial clusters and the ports. The highway is envisaged to smooth freight movement towards Kattupalli and Ennore ports, which are important gates for exports of automobiles, electronics, and engineering from the region.

The development also intends to relieve exceptionally chronic traffic problems on the existing National Highway connecting Chennai and Bengaluru, particularly on the Sriperumbudur-Vellore segment, which has remained bottlenecked for a long time due to a heavy influx of passenger and cargo traffic.

With its alternative high-capacity corridor, this new highway is expected to cut down on travel time from Tambaram to Sriperumbudur, Cheyyar, Arcot, and Vellore in the process of strengthening the logistics backbone of Tamil Nadu. This will be a major game changer for industries from Oragadam and Cheyyar that rely heavily on congested routes for just one way or the other when it comes to cargo movement.

Though the officials did not provide detailed timelines for the implementation of the project itself, they do share that the highway scheme fits well into the bigger industrial infrastructure expansion and logistics connectivity focus in the entire Tamil Nadu state.

The completion of this corridor could not only help decongest traffic between Chennai and Vellore but also assist economically through the speedy linking of several industrial hubs via ports and markets.