The government has revised the highway construction target for this year upwards to 13,800 km from 12,500 km set at the start of the year, minister of road transport and highways Nitin Gadkari said on Thursday.
The target seeks to surpass the best-ever performance of the ministry when it constructed 13,327 km of highways in 2020-21. The target for the year is 33.7% higher than the achievement of FY23 when 10,331 km of highways were built.
In the first quarter of the financial year, 2,250 km of highways were built with an investment of Rs 99,273 crore. For the full year, the capital spending target of the ministry is Rs 2.58 trillion.
Replying to the questions in Lok Sabha, Gadkari said 310 highway projects have been identified for completion between now and December-end. Till December, the ministry is also targeting exhausting 91% of its capital outlay of Rs 2.58 trillion.
Construction of national highways in the country is mainly carried out by the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI), National Highways & Infrastructure Development Corporation Ltd (NHIDCL) and the road wing of the ministry.
As the length of highways has increased, toll collections have also gone up every year. Overall toll collections at highways, which includes government-funded and private concessionaires, touched Rs 48,028 crore in FY23, up from Rs 33,907 crore in the previous year.
Average monthly toll collection of the NHAI between April and June of FY24 stood at Rs 4,406 crore as against Rs 4,083 crore in the January-March quarter, the minister said in reply to another question.
In 2022-23, the average monthly toll collection of NHAI was Rs 3,841 crore.
Gadkari said the government has appointed a consultant to provide advisory service on the implementation of new technology like Global Satellite System (GNSS)-based barrier free flow tolling.
“The GNSS has the capacity to retrieve the positioning of the vehicle on the national highway and calculates the user fee based on the distance travelled,” he said.