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Bharatmala

Indian highway and expressway construction project

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  • 4 chapters

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This ambitious umbrella programme subsumed all existing Highway Projects including the flagship National Highways Development Project (NHDP), launched by the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government in 1998. The total investment for 83,677 km (51,994 mi) committed new highways is estimated at ₹10.63 trillion (US$110 billion), making it the single largest outlay for a government road construction scheme (as of March 2022). The project will build highways from Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Punjab, Haryana and then cover the entire string of Himalayan territories - Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand - and then portions of borders of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar alongside Terai, and move to West Bengal, Sikkim, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, and right up to the Indo-Myanmar border in Manipur and Mizoram. Special emphasis will be given on providing connectivity to far-flung border and rural areas including the tribal and backward areas.

Other than NHDP related projects which are greenfield, there is Brownfield National Highway Projects which is an upgrade/widening of existing four-lane highways into six-lane highways that are not controlled access highways. Many state highways have been converted to National Highways under this project. It is both an enabler and beneficiary of other key Government of India schemes, such as industrial corridor, Make in India, Startup India, Standup India, Setu Bharatam, Sagarmala, dedicated freight corridors, UDAN-RCS, Digital India, BharatNet, and Parvatmala.

Context

Size of Indian highway network

India's 6,617,100 km (4,111,675 mi) road network is the largest in the world, of which only 2% (~1,60,000 km) are national highways (NHs) carrying 40% road traffic.

Benefits of Bharatmala

Bharatmala will significantly boost highway infrastructure:

  • Raise six NC corridors to 50 corridors (6 NC and 44 EC)
  • Raise 40% freight to 80% freight on national highways
  • Raise 300 districts to 550 districts connected by minimum four-lane highways

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