Changing Road Revolution- From Unpaved Roads to Expressways
May 1, 2008
Last few years of development in India have not only been inspirational but also fruitful. The development includes variety of infrastructural projects like the Delhi Gurgoan Expressway, the Delhi Metro, the Bandra Worli Sea Link (Mumbai), the Bangalore and Hyderabad International Airport, and many others. Among the most influential projects, the road network has improved drastically in the last decade.
Gone are the days when you would imagine roads in India as high unpaved and "kachcha". Though there are still such roads present, you cannot absolutely ignore the national highway network of roads in the nation. By now, India has around 67,000 kilometers of national highways (Wikipedia), most of which are two laned (one lane in each direction), and the rest are either four-laned or expressways separated by a median. What is more interesting is the fact that these highways account for a few percent of entire nation's road length but carry about 40% of the national traffic.
The National Highway Authority of India (NHAI) is the prime authority for the management, development and maintainence of the national highways.The road network of India consists of the following:
The length of rural roads is around 2.65 million skilometer, forty times more than the length of national highways. However as mentioned earlier, the national highways carry about forty percent of the traffic of the entire length of roads. Most of the roads are two-laned (one lane in each direction) and they account for about 56% of the total road network. Multi-laned roads form about 12% of the roads while the rest are single laned. (Statistics provided by NHAI website).
In a developing country like India, expressways are now coming up in many parts of the nation. The first expressway ever opened in India was the Ahmedabad-Baroda expressway. The planning of the expressway was done in the early 70s, however just like any other Indian project, its implementation came about the mid-90's and the project was completed and open to the public in 2001.
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