National highways of India


The National highways in India are a network of trunk roads that is owned by the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways. It is constructed and managed by the National Highway Authority of India, the National Highways and Infrastructure Development Corporation, and the public works departments of state governments.
The National Highways Authority of India is the nodal agency responsible for building, upgrading, and maintaining most of the National Highways network. It operates under the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways. The National Highways Development Project is a major effort to expand and upgrade the network of highways. NHAI often uses a public–private partnership model for highway development, maintenance, and toll-collection.
In India, National Highways are at-grade roads, whereas Expressways are controlled-access highways where entrance and exit is controlled by the use of ramps that are incorporated into the design of the expressway.

Characteristics

India has of National Highways as of April 2019.
National Highways constituted 2.7% of India's total road network, but carried about 40% of road traffic, as of 2013. In 2016, the government vowed to double the highway length from 96,000 to 200,000 km.
The majority of existing highways are two-lane roads, though much of this is being expanded to four or more lanes. Some sections of the network are toll roads. Only a few highways are built with concrete. Bypasses have been constructed around larger towns and cities to provide uninterrupted passage for highway traffic. Some existing roads have been reclassified as National Highways.

History

The National Highways Act, 1956 provided for private investment in the building and maintenance of the highways.
The National Highways Authority of India was established by the National Highways Authority of India Act, 1988. Section 16 of the Act states that the function of NHAI is to develop, maintain, and manage the National Highways and any other highways vested in, or entrusted to, it by the Government of India.
In 1998 India launched a massive program of highway upgrades, called the National Highways Development Project, in which the main north–south and east–west corridors and highways connecting the four metropolitan cities have been fully paved and widened into four-lane highways. Some of the busier National Highway sectors in India were also converted to four- or six-lane limited-access highways.
The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways adopted a new systematic numbering of National Highways in April 2010. It is a systematic numbering scheme based on the orientation and the geographic location of the highway. The new system indicates the direction of National Highways whether they are east–west or north–south. It also indicates the geographical region where they are with even numbers increasing from east to west starting from NH2 and odd numbers increasing from north to south starting from NH1.
Bharatmala, a centrally-sponsored and funded road and highways project of the Government of India with a target of constructing of new highways, has been started in 2018. Phase I of the Bharatmala project involves the construction of 34,800 km of highways at an estimated cost of by 2021-22.

Statewise

Trivia