Nitin Gadkari Promises US-level Highways In Haryana By 2024 Ahead Of State Polls

Minister of Road Transport and Highways of India, Nitin Gadkari recently dominated the headlines at a rally in Bhim Nagar’s Ram Leela ground. Gadkari was addressing a crowd of 2,000-2,500 people ahead of the Haryana assembly polls to be conducted on October 5. He said, “Haryana’s national highways infrastructure will be better than the US (United States of America) by the end of 2024… Work in this 10 years was just a trailer, asli film shuru hona baaki hai.” Before this rally, Gadkari has made similar claims about making India’s infrastructure similar to or even better than the US. Is implementing this claim on the ground practically possible? The explainer written below tries to find an answer to this question.

To get the answer to this question, we primarily looked at data from many sources including reports from Nitin Gadkari’s ministry and the US Department of Transportation (Federal Highway Administration – FHWA). The reports from the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) and the highway infrastructure of India and America were also looked upon. In these reports, we tried to understand the challenges of both the US and India’s highway systems.

Total Road Network

1. Road Network in India: India has about 66.71 lakh km of road network.

2. Length of National Highways: The length of National Highways is 1.46 lakh kilometres (about 2 per cent of the total road length).

3. Road length per 1,000 people: India has a mere 5.13 km of road length per 1,000 people.

4. Road Network in the USA: USA has about 68.03 lakh km of road network.

5. National Highway System (USA): Under the National Highway System (USA), there are 2.64 lakh kilometre-long roads. 78, 000 kilometres of these roads are a part of the Interstate Highway System (part of the National Highway System). The length of roads per 1000 people is approximately 20.1 kilometres, i.e., four times more than in India.

National Highways in India (1.43 lakh kilometres) constitute only 2.3 per cent of the total road network. However, they bear 40 per cent of the traffic load. Interstate highways in the US constitute about 1.2 per cent of the total road network but carry about a quarter of vehicle journeys.