The Golden Quadrilateral is a national highway network connecting several major industrial, agricultural and cultural centres of India. It forms a quadrilateral with all the four major metro cities of India forming the vertices, viz., Delhi (north), Kolkata (east), Mumbai (west) and Chennai (south). Other major cities connected by this network include Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Balasore, Bhadrak, Bhubaneswar, Cuttack, Berhampur, Durgapur, Faridabad, Guntur, Gurugram, Jaipur, Kanpur, Pune, Kolhapur, Surat, Vijayawada, Eluru, Ajmer, Visakhapatnam, Bodhgaya, Varanasi, Prayagraj, Agra, Mathura, Dhanbad, Gandhinagar, Udaipur, and Vadodara. The main objective of these super highways is to reduce the travel time between the major cities of India, running roughly along the perimeter of the country. The North–South corridor linking Srinagar and Kanyakumari, and East–West corridor linking Silchar (Assam) and Porbandar (Gujarat) are additional projects. These highway projects are implemented by the National Highway Authority Of India (NHAI). At 5,846 kilometres (3,633 mi), it is the largest highway project in India and the fifth longest in the world. It is the first phase of the National Highways Development Project (NHDP), and consists of two, four, and six-lane express highways, built at a cost of ₹600 billion (US$7.5 billion). The project was planned in 1999, launched in 2001, and was completed in 7 January 2012.
The National highways in India are a network of trunk roads owned by the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways. National highways have flyover access or some controlled-access, where entrance and exit is through the side of the flyover. At each highway intersection, flyovers are provided to bypass the traffic on the city, town, or village. These highways are designed for speeds of 100 km/h. Some national highways have interchanges in between, but do not have total controlled-access throughout the highways. The highways are constructed and managed by the Central Public Works Department (CPWD), the National Highways and Infrastructure Development Corporation Limited (NHIDCL), and the public works departments (PWD) of state governments. Currently, the longest National Highway in India is National Highway 44 at 4,112 km. India started four laning of major national highways with the National Highway Development Project (NHDP). As of March 2022 India have approximately 35,000 km of four laned National highways.
The National Highways Authority of India or NHAI is an autonomous agency of the Government of India, set up in 1995 and is responsible for management of a road network of over 50,000 km of National highways out of 1,32,499 km in India. It is a nodal agency of the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH). NHAI has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) for satellite mapping of highways.
Roads in India are an important mode of transport in India. India has a network of over 6,331,791 kilometres (3,934,393 mi) of roads. This is the second-largest road network in the world, after the United States. At of roads per square kilometre of land, the quantitative density of India's road network is equal to that of Hong Kong, and substantially higher than the United States, China, Brazil and Russia. Adjusted for its large population, India has approximately 5.13 kilometres (3.19 mi) of roads per 1,000 people, which is much lower than United States 20.5 kilometres (12.7 mi) but higher than that of China 3.6 kilometres (2.2 mi). India's road network carries over 71% of its freight and about 85% of passenger traffic.
The National Highways Development Project (NHDP) was a project of four laning of existing national highways and six laning of selected major national highways of India. The project was started in 1998 under the leadership of Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee. National Highways account for only about 2% of the total length of roads, but carry about 40% of the total traffic across the length and breadth of the country. This project is managed by the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) under the Ministry of Road, Transport and Highways. The NHDP represents 49,260 km of roads and highways work and construction in order to boost economic development of the country. The government has planned to end the NHDP program in early 2018 and subsume the ongoing projects under a larger Bharatmala project.
Kerala, a state in Southern India, has a network of 11 National Highways, 72 State Highways and many district roads.
The Ministry of Ports, Shipping and Waterways is the Indian ministry responsible for formulation and administration of the rules, regulations and laws relating to ports, shipping and waterways. The minister is Sarbananda Sonowal.
Expressways are the highest class of roads in India. In July 2023, the total length of expressways in India was 5,579 km (3,467 mi), with 8,366 km (5,198 mi) under construction. These are controlled-access highways where entrance and exits are controlled by the use of cloverleaf or trumpet or grade separated interchanges that are incorporated into the design of the expressway and designed for maximum speed of 120 km/h, whereas National highways are flyover access or tolled, where entrance and exit is through the side of the flyover, at each intersection of highway with road, flyovers are provided to bypass the city/town/village traffic and these highways are designed for speed of 100 km/h. Some roads are not access-controlled expressways but are still named expressways, such as the Biju Expressway, these are actually state highways that are not declared by the central government as an Expressway, hence not an Expressway or National Highway.
In Tamil Nadu, the Highways & Minor Ports Department (HMPD) is primarily responsible for construction and maintenance of roads including national highways, state highways and major district roads. HMPD was established as Highways Department (HD) in April 1946 and subsequently renamed on 30 October 2008. It operates through seven wings namely National Highways Wing, Construction & Maintenance Wing, NABARD and Rural Roads Wing, Projects Wing, Metro Wing, Tamil Nadu Road Sector Project Wing, Investigation and Designs Wing geographically spread across the state in 38 districts with about 120 divisions and 450 subdivisions.
Tamil Nadu, a state in South India, has a developed, dense, and modern transportation infrastructure, encompassing both public and private transport. Its capital city Chennai is well-connected by land, sea, and air and serves as a major hub for entry into South India.
Kerala Public Works Department (KPWD) is a department under the government of the state of Kerala, India. It manages the construction and maintenance of civil structures owned by the government viz; government buildings, government owned hospitals, roads, bridges etc. The KPWD was formed in 1956 following reorganization of states.
East-West Industrial Corridor Highway of Arunachal Pradesh, a 2-lane and 966.78 km long including existing 274.20 km Pasighat-Manmao route, is a proposed highway across lower foothills of Arunachal Pradesh state in India from Bhairabkunda in Assam at tri-junction of Bhutan-Assam-Arunachal Pradesh in west to Kanubari tri-junction of Nagaland-Assam-Arunachal Pradesh in east.
National Highway 3, or NH 3, is a national highway in India. It starts from Atari adjacent to India-Pakistan border and near Amritsar and terminates at Leh in Ladakh, via Manali in Himachal Pradesh.
The Sagarmala Programme is an initiative by the Government of India to enhance the performance of the country's logistics sector. The programme envisages unlocking the potential of waterways and the coastline to minimize infrastructural investments required to meet these targets.
The Bharatmala Pariyojna is an ongoing project that will interconnect 550 District Headquarters through a minimum 4-lane highway by raising the number of corridors to 50 and move 80% freight traffic to National Highways by interconnecting 24 logistics parks, 66 inter-corridors (IC) of total 8,000 km (5,000 mi), 116 feeder routes (FR) of total 7,500 km (4,700 mi) and 7 north east Multi-Modal waterway ports. The project also includes development of tunnels, bridges, elevated corridors, flyovers, overpass, interchanges, bypasses, ring roads etc. to provide shortest, jam free & optimized connectivity to multiple places, it is a centrally-sponsored and funded Road and Highways project of the Government of India. This ambitious umbrella programme will subsume all existing Highway Projects including the flagship National Highways Development Project (NHDP), launched by the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government in 1998. Bharatmala is mainly focused on connecting remote areas and satellite cities of megacities such as Bengaluru, Pune, Hyderabad etc. The total investment for 83,677 km (51,994 mi) committed new highways is estimated at ₹10.63 lakh crore (US$130 billion), making it the single largest outlay for a government road construction scheme. The project will build highways from Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Punjab, Haryana and then cover the entire string of Himalayan territories - Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand - and then portions of borders of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar alongside Terai, and move to West Bengal, Sikkim, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, and right up to the Indo-Myanmar border in Manipur and Mizoram. Special emphasis will be given on providing connectivity to far-flung border and rural areas including the tribal and backward areas.
Multi-Modal Logistics Parks (MMLPs) is a key policy initiative of the Government of India, led by National Highways Logistics Management Limited under Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) and the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI), to develop Multi-Modal Logistics Parks in hub-and-spoke model to improve the country's freight logistics sector by lowering overall freight costs and time, cutting warehousing costs, reducing vehicular pollution and congestion, improving the tracking and traceability of consignments through infrastructural, procedural, and information technology interventions.
National Highway 179A, commonly referred to as NH 179A, is a national highway in India, which comes under Ministry of Road Transport & Highways, Government of India. It is a secondary route of National Highway 79. NH-179A traverses the state of Tamil Nadu in India.
The National Highways and Infrastructure Development Corporation Limited (NHIDCL) is a fully owned company of the Government of India, set up in 2014 and is responsible for management of a network of over 10,000 km of National Highways out of 1,15,000 km in India. It is a nodal agency of the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways. Krishan Kumar (IAS) is the present Managing Director of NHIDCL since 14th February 2024.
Dineshchandra R. Agrawal Infracon Private Limited or DRA Infracon is an infrastructure development and construction company based at Ahmedabad in Gujarat, India. It was founded by Mr. Dineshchandra Rameshwarji Agrawal at Deesa in Banaskantha district of Gujarat in 1972. DRA Infracon got incorporated in the Ministry of Corporate Affairs on November 07, 2003.
