Emerging Trends&Issues in Roads and Highways in India

The aim of the paper is to emphasize on the emerging trends, growth and issues of the road sector. It covers various pertinent issues, trends, role of PPP model and expected future focus areas in the roads and highway sector. As India has the second largest road network in the world. Road construction and award trends in recent years also give optimism of achieving such high targets. Focus continues to be on Bharatmala Pariyojana, with added stress on multimodal integration, road safety, increasing use of Information Technology (IT) applications, augmentation of existing funding sources and emphasis on green initiatives. Many issues have been plaguing the roads and highways sector in like land acquisition, streamlined operations, financing, operation and maintenance (O& M) and the revival of languishing projects. The government has been taking a number of initiatives to solve the various issues such as operational initiatives like process streamlining and various technological initiatives to increase operational efficiencies, measures to revise languishing projects like equity divestment, one-time fund infusion, amicable dispute resolution and other initiatives like continuous evolution of PPP mode. Highway development for bridging the infrastructure gap is likely to be over in the future and development/construction activities can reduce progressively. This paper identifies that a shift is expected from highway construction/ development to providing the quality service to various highway users by enhancing the use of technological applications, adoption of safety solutions, promotion of sustainability trends and augmenting existing source of finances. This shift has led to the emerging trends in roads and highways sector in India and is expected to resolve the issues in the coming future.