The Indian National Highways

India’s road network comprises of Expressways, National Highways, State Highways, Major District Roads, other District Roads and Village Roads. Of these, the National and State Highways both are 195000 kilometers in length. The National Highway alone consists of only 1.945 of the entire length of the roads but it carries almost 40% of the entire traffic across to all parts of the country. In the Tenth Plan of 2002-2007, a huge portion is allotted for the development of National Highways, State Highways and Major District Roads and Rural Roads. In this five-year plan the National Highways Development (NHDP) Phase-I and Phase-II are to be completed and the deficiencies are to be removed. The National Highways are the main long distance roadways, are maintained by the Central Government and most of them are two-lane highways.

The latest National Highways Bill (1995) has made provision for private investors for the building and the maintenance of the highways. Recently certain roads have also been classified as National Highways or NHs in order to give national connectivity to far flung places. Bypasses have been made in towns and cities for free flowing highway traffic. Climate, demographic locations and the traffic has not permitted the highways to have the same features and these therefore may have six-lanes in some areas and may even have non-metallic stretches in remote areas. A lot of the NHs are still being constructed or upgraded. The long ones connect the Metros. Short shoots of the highway give connectivity to most close ports or harbours. The NH7 that connects Varanasi in UP to Kanyakumari and covers 2369 km is the longest NH. This passes through the Jabalpur, Nagpur, Hyderabad and Bangalore metros. The shortest is the NH47A which is a 6 km stretch to the Ernkulam-Kochi Port. India also has the world’s highest motorable highway from Shimla to Leh in Ladakh, Kashmir. Amongst the few highways that are concretized, the 95 km stretch of the Mumbai-Pune Expressway is one.

National Highways have helped to form the economy of India as these have encouraged development all along its route, and as a result a lot of towns have come about along the major highways. These Highways have helped improve the Road conditions in India and reduce the Road traffic in India and so have helped reduce the Traffic jams in India.

India Traffic News said that there had been a huge upgradation of highways called the Golden Quadrilateral, where the main north-south and east-west connecting corridors between the 4 metros were concretised into 4-lane highways and has some awesome spots.

Many National Highway areas in India have been made into 6- or 4-lane expressways like Delhi-Agra, Delhi-Jaipur, Ahmedabad-Vadodara, Mumbai-Pune, Mumbai-Surat, Bangalore-Mysore, Bangalore-Chennai and Chennai-Tada. Latest traffic news and City specific news says that there is another ambitious plan to change all the Golden Quadrilateral Highways (6000 km) to 6-lane highways/expressways) by the year 2012.

About Author: Abhimanyu Singh is the contributing author to website www.easydriveforum.com, It is the first ever Indian Road Traffic forum, It brings lots of Indian road users to a common platform, where they can discuss on Road safety in India, Traffic safety in India, Indian Traffic rules, Driving in India, Delhi Traffic, Bangalore Traffic and Traffic in other cities of India.
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