Nitin Gadkari Aims To Construct 40 Km of Highway Every Day

Recently, it is reported that the Government has set up a budget overlay of Rs 1.18 lakh crores for the Road Transport and Highway Ministry for the 2021-2022 period. This budget is 18 per cent higher than the estimated number that the ministry is planning to spend by March. With this budget, the ministry aims to build 11,000 km of the national highway in the next 12 months. In addition, the National Highway Authority is now allowed to draw Rs 65,000 crore from the market to meet its investment requirement.

Government has approved a budget overlay of Rs 1.18 lakh crores for the Road Transport and Highway Ministry

Nitin Gadkari, Union Road Transport and Highway Minister, shared that he expected to increase the freeway development pace to 40 kilometres per day by the end of March. He also said, “The budget has laid huge emphasis on infrastructure development.”

Nirmala Sitharaman, Minister of Finance, also revealed that development of 3,800 km of the highway which has a cost of Rs 3.3 lakh crore has been awarded under the Rs 5.35 lakh crore Bharatmala Pariyojana project. Untill this point, 13,000 km of the highway have been constructed. The finance minister said, “By March 2022, we would be awarding another 8,500 km and completing an additional 11,000 km of NH corridors.”

The finance minister also gave out details of the roadmaps for eight major projects including the Delhi-Mumbai, Delhi-Dehradun, Delhi-Katra, Bengaluru-Chennai, Kanpur-Lucknow expressway. According to the minister, these new highways will have four or six lanes. Moreover, it will be developed with an advanced traffic management system. New technologies like speed radars, variable message signboards and GPS-enable recovery vans will be applied to the new expressway system.

It is hoped that the budget can boost the construction of the national highways 

Nitin Gadkari confirmed that the monetization of the completed highway projects and the upcoming expressway will be accelerated by NHAI.

“Monetisation of viable infrastructure projects will help us take up more work. The ratio of budgetary support and revenue from monetisation can be up to 1:9 and that will enable us to upgrade our infrastructure to meet future requirements.”

As of late, the Government has also approved the scrappage policy which is aimed to promote environment-friendly vehicles and reduce emission level. Under this policy, all commercial vehicles over 15 years and over-20-year-old personal vehicles can be scrapped. Other than scrapping the old vehicles, the owners have an option to renew the fitness certificate and pay Green Tax which can go up to 50 per cent of the annual road tax of the vehicle.