“I“Our wealth did not build our roads. It is our roads that have created our wealth.” A version of this famous saying by former US President John F. Kennedy hangs in the visitors’ waiting room in the office of Nitin Gadkari, Union Minister for Road Transport and Highways. Gadkari’s goal is to build a highway network that rivals the best in the world. This will significantly reduce travel times for goods and passengers and improve the competitiveness of Indian industry. The highway sector receives over Rs 2 billion annually to build, upgrade and maintain more than 10,000 kilometers. Over the past decade, the network has expanded by about 60 percent to about 140,000 kilometers. India is already benefiting from improved infrastructure: thanks to better highways, expressways and electronic tolls, transit time for trucks has reduced by about 20 percent over the past decade, according to government figures. The Delhi-Mumbai Expressway is expected to reduce the current 48-hour travel time between the two cities to just 12 hours. A similar transformation is taking place in the railways. Over the past decade, the government has significantly increased funding for the country’s oldest transport operator. Annual expenditure has risen from around Rs 53,000 crore (53 billion) in 2014-15 to Rs 2.5 trillion (25 billion) this year, an annual increase of 15 percent over the decade. The vision for 2047 is that trains or even trucks will take no more than 6-8 hours to travel between cities like Delhi and Kolkata or Chennai and Mumbai.

Massive infra boost