New Delhi: The government has increased more than 4 times in the allocation of funds for the development of national highways in the past eight years.
While only RS 24,700 Crore allocated for this in 2014-15, this has increased to Rs 1.17 lakh Crore at 2021-22, an increase of 443%.
Road and highway services also told Lok Sabha that the average annual NH construction in the last seven years was 9,000 km and the average work was provided for widening and construction of 10,781 km from the NHS.
The ministry said 41 projects cost around Rs 26,500 Crore have been postponed for several reasons including land labor and financial inability of contractors.
This has submitted a new schedule detail for these projects.
Government data also showed that the highway ministry continued NHS notification after putting a short break in 2019-20.
In fact, in the last 10 years, the NHS declaration touched the bottom in 2019-20 when almost 495 km of state road was converted to NHS.
But at 2020-21, this was upgraded to 5,381 km.
Earlier this week the Ministry of Road Transportation Road submitted details on the length of the country that had been notified as the NHS in the last three years to Rajya Sabha.
The source said most of these NHS had been declared under the Bharatmala scheme.
While a maximum of 846 km of state roads in Telangana have been declared NHS in 2021-21, in Gujarat 844 km of state road getting NH tags.
The conversion of state roads to NHS has always been a political achievement both by the center and America.
After the state road was declared NH, the center began planning for expansion to meet increasing traffic demand.
Data accessed since 2011-12 shows that the maximum length of 13,085 km of state road was told as NHS in 2016-17 and 12,503 km added to the NH network in 2017-18.
In the following two years, this fell to 6,174 km and 495.
Between 2011-25 and 2020-21, the center added 61,360 km to NH network, which was around 44% of all NH networks in the country and mostly occurred during NDA-2 Prioritize the development of the highway to encourage economic activities.