Recent Developments
Under former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, India launched a massive program of highway upgrades, called the National Highway Development Project (NHDP), in which the main north-south and east-west connecting 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 have been converted to four or six lane expressways – for example, Delhi-Agra, Delhi-Jaipur, Ahmedabad-Vadodara, Mumbai-Pune, Mumbai-Surat, Bangalore-Mysore, Bangalore-Chennai, Chennai-Tada, Delhi-Meerut, Hyderabad-Vijayawada and Guntur-Vijayawada. Phase V of the National Highway Development Project is to convert all 6,000 km (3,700 mi) of the Golden Quadrilateral Highways to 6-lane highways/expressways by 2012.
The National Highways Act, 1956, as amended, provides for private investment in the building and maintenance of the highways. Recently, a number of existing roads have been reclassified as national highways. Bypasses have also recently been constructed around larger towns and cities to provide uninterrupted passage for highway traffic. The hugely varied climatic, demographic, traffic, and sometimes political situation in India results in NH being single lane in places with low traffic to six lanes in places with heavy traffic. National highways are being upgraded or are under construction. Some NH are long while some are short spurs off other NH to provide connectivity to nearby ports or harbours.
The longest NH is NH7, which runs between Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh to Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu, at the southernmost point of the Indian mainland, covering a distance of 2,369 km (1,472 mi), and passes through Hyderabad and Bangalore. The shortest NH is the NH47A, which spans 6 km (3.7 mi), to the Ernakulam - Kochi Port.
Read more about this topic: National Highway (India)
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