India gets 3,500km of new roads in April-November 2015

The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH), which is going about developing the road infrastructure network in the country, has awarded contracts for 5,331 kilometres of national highways  while 3,480km have been constructed during the current fiscal year till November 30, 2015.

During 2015-16, the Ministry has targeted to award 10,000km of National Highways, which is 25 percent more than the stretches awarded during 2014-15. Similarly, the Ministry aims to complete work in 6,300km of stretches, which is around 45 percent more than the kilometres completed during the last fiscal.

India has about 52.32 lakh kilometress of road network, which is the second largest in the world. This constitutes 100,475km of national highways, 148,256km of state highways and 49,83,579km of other roads.

The major highway programmes currently underway are the National Highways Development Programme, SARDP-NE (special programme for the North East) and LWE (Left Wing and Extremist affected areas).

Proposed Expressways
The government of India has approved a plan for constructing 1,000km of Expressways under NHDP Phase-VI at a cost of Rs 16,680 crore on a Design-Build-Finance-Operate-Transfer (DBFOT) basis. As per approval of the Cabinet, main criteria for selection of Expressway corridors will be the traffic volume and it was approved that the highest density corridor i.e. Vadodara-Mumbai Corridor (400km) be given top priority. It was also decided that remaining 600km will be selected out of the routes identified on the basis of traffic volume.

The high density corridors approved under NHDP Phase-VI are as under:

- Vadodara-Mumbai Corridor (400km)

- Delhi-Meerut (66km) on NH-58

- Bangalore-Chennai (334km) on NH-4

- Delhi-Jaipur (261km) on NH-8

- Delhi-Chandigarh (249km) on NH-1 and NH-22

- Kolkata-Dhanbad (277km) on NH-2 and

- Delhi-Agra (200km) on NH-2.

 In addition to these, the government is to take up the Eastern Peripheral Expressway (135km), which is not a part of NHDP Phase VI. Meanwhile, it has also prioritised the Eastern Peripheral Expressway, Delhi-Meerut Expressway and Vadodara-Mumbai Expressway

That's not all. The government is also considering construction of a few more Expressways. These include:

- Nagpur-Mumbai
- Jaipur-Ajmer-Ahmedabad
- Nagpur-Hyderabad
- Pune-Hyderabad
- Hyderabad-Bangalore
- Amravati-Hyderabad-Bangalore
-Delhi-Amritsar-Jammu-Katra