Highways Sector on Overdrive

The Indian highways sector forms the world’s second largest road network aggregating over 3.34 million km. But its national highways until recently constituted only about 2 percent at 74,000km. But things started changing dramatically for the better during the last fiscal when government decided to spend about Rs 1,20,000 crore per annum on building new highways and very recently fixed a staggering investment target of $60 billion to build 35,000km of roads in the next five years. About $40 billion of the targeted investment is expected to flow from the private sector investors, claims Union Road Transport and Highways Minister, Kamal Nath.