The government is working on National Master Plan for development of highways and expressways for 2047, that will enable trucks to more than double the distance they cover in a day to 800 km, a senior official said Thursday.
At present, trucks in India cover 300-350 km in a day which is much less than figures in the US and Europe. In Europe the limit is 750 km a day while in the US the drivers can legally drive up to 1100-1200 km a day driving at the speed 100 km an hour.
WIth expressways and newer highways the increase in speed would help bring down logistics costs by 3-4%, the official who did not wish to be named.
According to a recent study Logistics Cost in India: Assessment and Long-Term Framework by National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), in consultation with Asian Development Bank (ADB) and experts, logistics costs in the country range between 7.8% to 8.9% of the total economic output.
To make logistics more efficient the government had come out with the logistics policy in September last with the aim to reduce cost of logistics in India to be comparable to global benchmarks by 2030, improve the World Bank’s Logistics Performance Index (LPI) ranking and be among top 25 countries by 2030 and create data driven decision support mechanism for an efficient logistics ecosystem.
The World Bank has ranked India 38 out of 139 countries in its LPI rankings table for 2023, an improvement of six places from the ranking of 2018.
The National Masterplan for the development of the National Highways/ Expressways network for 2047 will increase the overall framework of the National Highways in the country manifold, he added.
The masterplan is part of the broader Vision 2047 that has been prepared by the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways.
Under the plan 50,000 km of access controlled highways are proposed to be constructed. The alignment of these expressways would be such that they will be just 100-125 km from any point in the country. At present the total length of access controlled expressways in the country is 2913 km.
Overall national highway length in the country is 1.46 lakh km the expressways and completion of stretches under ongoing highway development programmes like Bharatmala will take the total length beyond 2 lakh km which many believe would be enough to serve the country.
Apart from greenfield expressways, the government is also focussed on capacity augmentation on existing highways. The share of highways of less than 2 lane width has gone down to 10% in 2023 from 30% in 2014. Their overall length has decreased to 14,850 km from 27,517 km in 2014.
The share of highways with two lanes or more but less than 4 lanes has gone up to 58% or 85,096 km. Length of highways of four lanes or more has increased to 46,179 km which is 32% of the total, up from 18,371 km or 20% in 2014.
