National highways construction up, but govt may miss award target

With a month from the close of the financial year, construction of national highways (NH) in the country in FY24 has been nearly 13 per cent higher than the last financial year at 9,088 kilometres (km), data by the ministry of road transport and highways shows.
 

However, the government is likely to miss its target of awarding highway projects by a massive margin, despite a late push in February. The ministry awarded nearly 1,400 km of projects in the previous month to take its FY24 total to 4,872 km, which is 48 per cent of its revised target of 10,000 km. At the same time last year, the ministry had awarded 7,497 km of highways, which means that this financial year, it has awarded 35 per cent fewer projects (in km terms). After the awarding of new highway projects halved in 2023-24, the MoRTH had conveyed to the Union Cabinet the lag in approving the revised proposal of its flagship highway development programme, Bharatmala Phase-1, in which the estimated cost had doubled to more than Rs 10 trillion. 
 

In its monthly report to the Cabinet in November, the ministry had said that awarding of national highway projects between April and October had dipped of 48 per cent, the report said.

 

Now, the pending projects of Bharatmala Phase-1 and proposed projects under Bharatmala Phase-2 are being subsumed into the Vision 2047 plan, for which a cabinet note has been prepared by the highways ministry.

Construction of highways in February stood at 1430 km in February, which is higher than the 1260 km it had achieved in February 2023, but shy of what the Centre had expected.

The overall highway construction in the country would be around 12,000-13,000 km by the end of this financial year, Anurag Jain, Union highways secretary, had said on February 23. This would have required close to 5000 km of construction in the last two months of the fiscal.

With the latest data, the ministry needs to build close to 3000-3500 km of highways in March, which experts deem unlikely due to restrictions surrounding the model code of conduct for the Lok Sabha elections, which is slated to be enforced this week.