India's Road Construction Sector Issues and Challenges
There are many challenges being faced by the highway sector such as ensuring availability of construction materials and machinery, timely completion of projects, availability of trained human resources, and addressing concerns on road congestions and safety.
Prof. Satish Chandra, Director, CSIR-CRRI, New Delhi
India has the second-largest road network in the world, spanning 5.89 million kilometres. It transports 64.5% of all goods in the country and caters to almost 90% of total passenger traffic.
Road transportation has gradually increased over the years with improvement in connectivity between cities, towns, and villages. Highway construction increased at 17% CAGR between 2016 - 2021. Despite the pandemic lockdown, 13,298 km of highways were constructed during FY 2020-21. The Government of India has allocated ₹111 lakh crore (US$ 1.4 trillion) under the National Infrastructure Pipeline (NIP) for 2019-25. The roads sector is likely to get 18% capital expenditure out of this allocation. In spite of all these initiatives, almost 55% of our National Highways network is only two-lane wide and 24% is four lanes wide, so there is a huge demand for expansion and widening of roads.
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NBM&CW September 2021
