Road Sense

Road building equipment makers have some sophisticated machinery to offer. It is up to the authorities to use them judiciously.

- Jayashree Kini Mendes

At the recently held bauma Munich 2019, hun-dreds of vendors displayed some of the best and state-of-the-art road building equipment. Coming to the Asia Pacific construction equip-ment (CE) market, the demand for new products is rising due to the launch of emerging machinery with technically-advanced features including telematics, smart sensing technologies, etc. These eliminate human interference to a higher degree and provide worker safety as compared to conventional options. This only proves that excellent road building equipment are available.

High construction and infrastructure spending in emerging economies including India and China is majorly escalating the demand for construction machinery. Due to the rapid urbanisation and development of suburbs, the overall road building industry is seeing a surge.

WHAT AILS OUR ROADS

In the Union Budget 2018, the government had announced the ambitious Bharatmala Pariyojna has been approved for proving seamless connectivity of interior and backward areas and borders of the country to develop about 35,000km

in Phase I at an estimated cost of about Rs 5.35 lakh crore. The budgetary allocation for MoRTH has been increased to Rs 71,000 crore for 2018-19 from Rs 64,900 crore last fiscal.