End of the road for single-lane national highways
NEW DELHI : All existing single-lane national highways will be converted to double lanes, and having two lanes with paved shoulders will be mandatory to get an NH tag in future, two people aware of the road ministry’s plans said. The new criterion will be defined in the rules governing construction of national highways. A paved shoulder is part of a highway adjacent to the regularly travelled portion on the same level.
However, single-lane national highways may be continued in hilly regions. Broadening them would be considered only after an environmental impact assessment, and only if the project can be executed with limited damage to fragile mountain ecosystems, the officials said on condition of anonymity. Road ministry secretary Anurag Jain had earlier told Mint that the changes in the highway criterion were being worked out to ensure that such alignments conform to today’s mobility requirements.
The changes assume significance given that India is implementing one of the world’s largest highway building programmes, with about 50,000 km of highways to be constructed over the next 15 years. As on November-end 2023, India had a national highway network of 146,145 km, with just around 10% being less than two lanes as of December 2023. The plan is to convert as many of these to minimum two-lane stretches.
Going forward, no highway will be made of less than two lanes barring a few exceptions, the officials quoted above said. A query sent to road ministry on details of the proposed changes remained unanswered. “The above has been in discussions for some time now; it would be a step towards maintaining a basic minimum standard for national highways and would be instrumental in bringing a minimum uniformity, safety and traffic
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