3X Growth in National Highway Construction From FY 14 to FY 24, Finds Economic Survey

New Delhi: The Economic Survey presented by Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has highlighted a three times growth in national highway construction from FY14 to FY24. Over the last decade, national highways have expanded significantly, increasing by 1.6 times from 2014 to 2024. 

The Bharatmala Pariyojana has played a crucial role in this expansion, boosting the length of high-speed corridors by 12 times and 4-lane roads by 2.6 times between 2014 and 2024. This growth is attributed to a corridor-based National Highway(NH) development approach, which has improved the efficiency of highway construction.

 The average pace of NH construction has tripled, rising from 11.7 km per day in FY14 to approximately 34 km per day by FY24. This remarkable improvement has led to substantial advancements in logistics efficiency, as evidenced by India's rising rank in the World Bank’s ‘Logistics Performance Index,’ moving from 54 in 2014 and 44 in 2018 to 38 in 2023.

Meanwhile, a proactive policy for national highway maintenance has been adopted, engaging contractual maintenance agencies for each kilometer of the entire NH network. Maintenance is conducted through performance-based or short-term contracts, covering about 37,500 km of NH network. Additionally, long-term maintenance contracts of approximately 20 years have been undertaken for developed NH stretches through toll operate transfer and infrastructure investment trust modes.

However, continuous ribbon development along developed NHs is posing a challenge for the construction of a new parallel road/bypass. Now, the Government has started focusing on the development of accesscontrolled NHs. The Government is also targeting to make all NHs a minimum of two lanes with paved shoulders standards. Another challenge is the slow onboarding of digital land records, leading to land acquisition delays. This is further impacted by delays in approvals for forest and other environmental clearances.

The Economic Survey, prepared by the Economic Division of the Department of Economic Affairs in the Ministry of Finance and overseen by the Chief Economic Adviser, provides an insight into the state of the economy and various indicators for 2023-24 (April-March), as well as an outlook for the current year.