Making of a Highway Marathoner

IRB's Mhaiskar – a Civil engineer with Financial skill sets – emerges leader on the National Highway front

If Ratan Tata has made it big with his dream car Nano, here is some one who is making it big with highway projects. Meet Virendra Mhaiskar, CMD of IRB Infrastructure has been having road shows with a difference – bidding from one road and highway to another and winning contracts. The group had won the concession for country's first ever BOT (Build, Operate, Transfer) project – the Thane-Bhiwandi bypass – and the largest BOT – the Mumbai-Pune Expressway. Today, he manages as much as 414 km stretches of the National Highways which constitutes roughly 8% of the Golden Quadrant project.
It's a no mean achievement for a product of an engineering college from an obscure town called Airoli in Navi Mumbai. "Yes, it is like a marathon on the highway," says Mhaiskar. The competition is getting tough and interesting by the day, he says with a smile.
His road projects are also making IRB cash registers ring! IRB, in fact, today is the largest toll tax road operator in the country today 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 acounts.
In fact his marathon with road projects began some 18 years ago. Upon completing his studies in 1990, Mhaiskar joined his father and took over the responsibilities of the then new sector - toll collection operations. The team set up by him then even today manages the day to day toll operations for the Company.
In the year 1993 he led the project of strengthening the Nagpur airport runway. This was his first stint in road building which was completed successfully. With reforms in road sector in 1995 and the road projects taking shape on PPP basis, Mhaiskar felt the need to put in place an investment vehicle to fund the IRB Group's various initiatives in this sector. With this in mind, IRB was promoted in 1998, which today wholly owns all its subsidiaries engaged in construction, toll road and has majority control in the real estate subsidiary .
For quite some time now, Mhaiskar has focused his attention in building large projects for IRB With a view to building excellence all around and understanding the need to possess the capacity to construct with self owned resources, he has built a large equipment bank consisting of sophisticated construction equipment required for undertaking multiple projects. "At IRB, we undertake most of our work with our own resources says mhaiskar.
Over the years, this engineer has developed Financial skill sets too. Insiders say he personally works on all bids, engages a team to do a through research on costs before filing his bid. The latest bid that IRB has won – the Dahisar-Surat stretch of the National Highway development project Phase V - stands out as a shining example of competitive bidding. IRB Infrastructure offered a revenue share of 38% followed by L&T ( 35.21%) and Reliance Energy (33.61%).
This is in sharp contrast with the bidding for Gurgaon-Jaipur section where the highest bidder ETA-KMC consortium offered a high 48.06 % revenue share, followed by GMR_Punj Loyyed consortium's 36.5 %. Here the difference between the 1st and 2nd bidders works out to a massive 11.56%. In Panipat-Jalandhar Isolex led consortium offered a revenue share of 20.14% followed by REL's 5.08%, while in Chennai-Tada L&T was the highest bidder with a revenue sharing of 17.07% followed by Ramkay Infrastructure's 14.6%.
Analysts point out that the way bids were filed for Dahisar-Surat section proves that all the three had done their respective homework well, considering the low percentage of differences between the bids. It will be interesting to watch as to how ETA_KMC will ensure the high revenue sharing of 46%.
Ask Mhaiskar for the secret of his success. "It goes to the credit of Team IRB and the blessings of my Parents. I am only a member of the team. I am fortunate to have such excellent professional teams in every section – from bidding for tenders to executing the actual work ahead of schedule."
As an observer says all business roads lead to Mumbai. But roads that lead to Mumbai are under management of IRB - The Pune-Mumbai Expressway , Thane bhiwandi bypass on one side and the Bharuch-Surat-Dahisar sections on the other.