Highway construction in the just-concluded financial year (FY24) touched 12349 km clocking the second best performance ever, but fell short of the ‘aspirational target’ of 13814 km, a senior official said Tuesday.
Though the target was missed, the highway building in 2023-24 was up 20% as compared to 2022-23. The previous peak was recorded in 2021-22 when 13,327 km of highways were built. Construction speed that year was aided by less traffic on roads due to COVID-related lockdowns.
Of the total construction in FY24, 9642 km came through lane augmentation and 2707 through strengthening.
In FY 21 about 4900 km had come from strengthening and 8427 km was from lane augmentation. National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) contributed 6,644 km of construction and rest came from other agencies like National Highways and Infrastructure Development Corporation and roads wing of Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH).
The pace of awarding of highway projects that was languishing at 4872 km till February-end picked up in March and for the whole of FY 24 the length of new highways awarded touched 8551 km. The target for awarding highways in FY 24 was 10,000 km.
The ministry was able to spend 99.98% of its revised capital expenditure allocation of Rs 2,64,525 crore last year. It is again the best ever performance in terms of utilisation of allocated budget. In 2022-23 this figure was 99.18%. In FY24 the total capital expenditure crossed Rs 3.01 trillion with remaining coming through road building efforts of the private sector.
In 2024-25 the capital expenditure allocation in the interim budget is Rs 2.72 trillion and the ministry expects to spend the entire amount, the official added.
He said going forward the focus of highway development activities will be on access-controlled expressways. This plan is part of the Vision 2047 of the ministry which will be further subdivided on five-year action plans.
The government’s plan is to have 50,000 km of expressways in the country functional. At present 4,000 km of expressways are already functional and construction work of 6.000 km more is in progress.
The word on the expressway project is likely to get over by 2037. While finalising the grid of expressways it has been ensured that no place in India is more than 125 km away from it.