Govt to upgrade 3,700 km national highways

The government will upgrade around 3,700 kilometres (km) of national highways (NHs) under the National Highways Interconnectivity Improvement Project (NHIIP) at a cost of about Rs 20,000 crore.

The project, to be executed by the Ministry of Road Transport & Highways, would involve double-laning of single-lane highways in eight states in the next three years.

A senior ministry official said around 80 per cent of the funding would come from the World Bank, with the government providing the rest.

The project will help the government achieve its target of building 20 km road a day, set by Union Road Transport Minister Kamal Nath last year. When Nath assumed the charge of the ministry, the pace of construction was as low as 4 km a day, which has improved to over 13 km a day now.

The official said around 33 stretches had been identified in Bihar, Himachal Pradesh, Orissa, Uttarakhand, Karnataka, Rajasthan, West Bengal and Andaman & Nicobar Islands.

The first phase of the development would cover 807 km in Bihar, 667 km in Karnataka and 640 km in Himachal Pradesh. The other major gainers would be Orissa (662 km) and Uttarakhand (448 km).

Around 12,000 NHs are still single-lane and the ministry had earlier announced that it would convert all NHs to two-lane, with paved shoulders, in one go.

India has a road network of over 33,00,000 million km and 70,000 km of these are national highways. NHs constitutes only two per cent of the total road network, but carries 40 per cent of the total traffic. Over 15,000 km of NH have been upgraded by the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) under the National Highways Development Programme.

NHAI is also looking at raising $2 billion from the World Bank to fund projects on annuity. In an annuity project, a private developer builds the road and the government pays it in installments.