Bharatmala

Bharatmala
CountryIndia
MinistryMinistry of Road Transport and Highways
Established31 July 2015; 9 years ago (2015-07-31)
StatusActive
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The Bharatmala Pariyojna (lit. 'India garland project') was a project in India implemented by Government of India. It was slated to interconnect 550 District Headquarters (from the current 300) through a minimum 4-lane highway by raising the number of corridors to 50 (from the current 6) and move 80% of freight traffic (40% currently) to National Highways by interconnecting 24 logistics parks, 66 inter-corridors (IC) of total 8,000 km (5,000 mi), 116 feeder routes (FR) of total 7,500 km (4,700 mi) and 7 northeast Multi-Modal waterway ports.[1] The project also includes the development of tunnels, bridges, elevated corridors, flyovers, overpasses, interchanges, bypasses, ring roads, etc. to provide the shortest, jam-free & optimized connectivity to multiple places, it is a centrally-sponsored and funded Road and Highways project of the Government of India.[2]

This ambitious umbrella programme subsumed all existing Highway Projects including the flagship National Highways Development Project (NHDP), launched by the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government in 1998. The total investment for 83,677 km (51,994 mi)[3] committed new highways is estimated at ₹10.63 trillion (US$130 billion), making it the single largest outlay for a government road construction scheme (as of March 2022). The project will build highways from Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Punjab, Haryana and then cover the entire string of Himalayan territories - Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand - and then portions of borders of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar alongside Terai, and move to West Bengal, Sikkim, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, and right up to the Indo-Myanmar border in Manipur and Mizoram.[2] Special emphasis will be given on providing connectivity to far-flung border and rural areas including the tribal and backward areas.[4]

Other than NHDP related projects which are greenfield, there is Brownfield National Highway Projects which is an upgrade/widening of existing 4-lane highways into 6-lane highways that are not controlled access highways.[5] Many state highways have been converted to National Highways under this project.[6] It is both enabler and beneficiary of other key Government of India schemes, such as Industrial corridor, Make in India, Startup India, Standup India, Setu Bharatam, Sagarmala, Dedicated Freight Corridors(DFC), UDAN-RCS, Digital India, BharatNet, Parvatmala.

  1. ^ Cite error: The named reference mala1 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ a b "Bharat Mala: PM Narendra Modi's planned ₹14,000 crore (US$1.7 billion) road from Gujarat to Mizoram", The Economic Times, New Delhi, 29 April 2015
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference new1 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ "Bharatmala Project: Expressways, Economic Corridors, Logistic Parks and More Details - Infra Info Hub". 5 July 2024. Retrieved 14 July 2024.
  5. ^ "Brownfield National Highway Project | CEPT - Portfolio".
  6. ^ "Centre to convert State Highways with high traffic to national highways: Gadkari". 15 October 2022.