High On Highway

India is building roads at a frenetic pace. The dream of building 40 kilometres a day is within the realm of possibility now.

- Sumant Banerji

WHILE TAKING CHARGE of the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways in May 2014, Nitin Jairam Gadkari set himself and his ministry an audacious target — to raise the pace of road construction in the country to 40 kilometres (KM) a day. This amounted to a four-fold increase from 8.7 KM per day in 2013/14, which was around a seven-year low.

A spate of reforms has ensured that this ‘impossible’ target is now within reach. Over the last four years, road construction has picked up pace from 12 KM per day in his first year (2014/15) of the NDA government to almost 27 KM a day in 2017/18. For this fiscal, the last of this government’s five-year tenure, the target is 45 KM per day.

“We achieved the highest ever award of 51,073 km of National Highway projects and highest ever construction of 28,531 km over a four-year period from 2014/15 to 2017/18. Construction of National Highways has more than doubled to over 27 km a day and the total investment in the sector has increased by 2.5 times,” says Gadkari.

Developing modern high-speed highways crisscrossing the country is a sure-shot way to develop the countryside. India has a total road network of 5.6 million KM of national and state, urban and rural roads, the second largest in the world. National highways account for 2 per cent of this network but carry over 40 per cent of overall traffic. Led by high investment from the public exchequer, it has also given a boost to the infrastructure sector. Government investment in highways more than doubled from ₹32,000 crore in 2014/15 to nearly ₹65,000 crore in 2017/18. It is proposed to be increased by 9.4 per cent to ₹71,000 crore in the current fiscal year.