As the Bharatmala Pariyojana—the umbrella programme launched by the Centre in 2017 to develop 74,942 km of national highways that is seeing massive cost and time overrun, the Modi government has modified its strategy according to which the Union Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) will identify individual road corridors and take them up for approval and implementation.
The Union Cabinet’s August 2 approval for eight high-speed roads, spanning a length of 936 km and entailing investment of Rs 50,655 crore, is part of this new strategy.
The road ministry has identified 20 proposed corridors that will be approved by December 2024. These include the 783 km long Kharagpur-Cuttack-Visakhapatnam corridor; the 281 km Guwahati-Shillong-Silchar corridor passing through Assam and Meghalaya; the 68 km long Bhavnagar-Bharuch corridor in Gujarat; and the 335 km Mangaluru-Bengaluru corridor in Karnataka, among others.
According to senior officials in the ministry and the NHAI, the decision to go for a corridor-based approach instead of launching an umbrella programme is the fallout of the arbitrary implementation of Phase I of the Bharatmala programme. There were several lapses which were also highlighted by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) in its report last year.
Of the 34,800 km approved under Phase I of Bharatmala at a cost of Rs 5.35 lakh crore, 26,425 km in projects have been awarded so far. Out of this, only 18,180 km length has been completed at a cost of approximately Rs 5 lakh crore—almost equal to the total project cost, the second road ministry official quoted above said.
The remaining 8,000 km of Phase I have been shelved. The original deadline to complete the 34,800 km was September 2022. The official quoted above said that not only has the completion deadline not been met but the overall cost of the project has also escalated close to Rs 10 lakh crore. The government has already decided to scrap Phase II of the Bharatmala programme that envisaged developing 40,000 km more of national highways. The road ministry in June—soon after the new government was formed—moved a Cabinet note seeking approval for a new flagship programme to develop 30,600 km of highways by 2031-2032 for Rs 22 lakh crore. It was, however, rejected by the finance ministry.
