Relevance: mains: G.S paper III: Economy: Infrastructure
The first major policy push to widen the National Highways was made in 1998 during Atal Bihari Vajpayee government by launching the National Highways Development programme (NHDP). Which had two major components of Golden Quadrilateral (GQ) connecting the four metro cities of Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata and Kanyakumari and Silchar to Porbandar. These networks are known as North-South and East-West corridors.
The second big revolutionary decision to upgrade NHs was taken in October 2017 when the Central government approved the phase-I of Bharatmala Pariyojana.
Details:
- The massive highway development programme has many firsts to its credit.
- Starting from preparation of the plan to identifying the highway stretches and the new approach of building roads on new alignment. The Road Transport and Highways Ministry has termed as “crow flight” alignments.
- Improved logistics movement has a force multiplier effect on the economy.
- Moreover, to cater to the need for infrastructure development in the border and coastal areas to India’s Export-Import (EXIM) trade, the highway development programme has provisioned for improving border roads based on strategic importance, particularly the ones connecting to trading points with India’s neighbours-Nepal, Bangladesh and Bhutan.
- The coastal road development and port-connectivity roads enhancement have been synergized with the Sagarmala programme.
Components of Bharatmala Pariyojana:
1) Economic Corridors:
- The origin-destination study which was commissioned with the aim of improving logistics efficiency identified 44 new Economic Corridors.
- As per the plan, these corridors along with national corridors (GQ and North South and East West) would form India’s new Highway Grid.
- As per estimates, the National and Economic Corridors along with their inter-corridors and feeder routes would be able to carry 80 per cent of our freight traffic.
2) Inter Corridor and Feeder Routes:
- The effectiveness of the corridors can be improved by development of the feeder routes.
3) Improvement in Efficiency of National Corridors:
- In the past few years, these National Corridors have also developed choke points impacting logistics efficiency. So, to decongest and do away with these choke points, new Ring Roads and bypasses/elevated corridors will be built.
- In addition, multimodal logistics parks will be developed at critical economic nodes along GQ and North South and East West corridors to enable efficient modal transfers, freight aggregation and disaggregation.
4) Development of Border and International Connectivity Roads:
- Around 3,300 kilometres of border roads have been identified to be built and widened along the international border for their strategic importance.
5) Development of Coastal and Port Connectivity Roads:
- Under Bharatmala programme, about 2,100 kilometers of coastal roads have been identified to be built along the coast.
- These roads would boost both tourism and industrial development of the coastal region.
- A major focus will be to improve linkage to state government owned and private ports.
6) Development of Green-field Expressways:
- NHAI Board is an inter-ministerial entity, which has representation from Highways and Finance Ministries, Niti Aayog and the Highway Authority.
Benefits:
- Bharatmala Pariyojana once implemented will enable improvement in efficiency of freight and passenger movement of NHs.
- The Network as identified under the Bharatmala network, will cater to 80 per cent of the inter-district freight movement in the country.
- The development of economic corridors and the associated inter corridor and feeder routes will enable improvement in average speeds.
- Improvement in average speed of the freight vehicles will, in turn, have three major benefits; improved vehicle utilization resulting in faster breakeven and hence lower freight cost per tonne per km; improvement in fuel efficiency of the vehicles due to lower idling time, resulting in lower freight cost and faster and reliable freight transit, leading to a reduction in average inventory carried in freight.
- In addition up gradation of NH Network in the first phase is expected to generate employment during the construction phase driven by increased level of economic activities due to development of the Economic Corridor network.
Funding for Programme:
- About one-third of the fund will come other from fuel cess and will come as budgetary support.
- This scheme is known as Toll Operate Transfer (TOT), which means completed stretches are bid out to private players make upfront payment to NHAI to get these works. They are responsible for maintenance of the highway stretches as well.