World records set by the Ministry of Road Transport in Infra development despite constraints of pandemic

India’s highway construction moved at a snail’s pace before 2014, with just 12-15 Kms of construction per day, delayed projects, and border infrastructure in shambles. But under the leadership of Nitin Gadkari, there has been a drastic change of things with on an average 37 kms of road being built per day and with the target of 40Kms per day, he has revolutionized the road development works in India and can be termed as India’s own real-life “Bob the Builder “. 37 Kms per day of road construction for a perspective means building a highway between Pune-Mumbai or Jaipur-Delhi in flat 3-4 days’ time! An achievement that has no other parallel comparisons. This all despite the constraints of labor and material posed due to the pandemic.

The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways has constructed 13,394 km of highways in the fiscal year 2020-21. Over the past 7 years length of the national highways in India has shot up more than 50 percent from 91,287 in April 2014 to 1,37,625 in March 2021. There has also been a 5.5 increase in the budget allocated to road infrastructure in 2021 compared to 2015. The pandemic has not at all affected the road growth with sanctioned road kilometer length increasing by 9 percentage points for FY 2021 over FY 2020 with a 126 percentage points increase in financial allocation.

‘We have constructed an average of 35 kilometers of roads per day in the last 380 days. I am very loyal to my departments. The idea is to up targets and motivates people to do better. We are hoping to increase construction to 40 kilometers per day. Toll collection is at Rs 34,000 crore despite lockdowns and farmer’s protests. There are 17 roads made in such a way that an airplane can land in emergency situations,’ said Nitin Gadkari while giving an interview to a news channel.

“We made three world records this month. India now holds the world record for the fastest road construction. We made it to the Guinness World Records by building a 2.5 km 4-lane concrete road within 24 hours and a 1-lane 25-km bitumen Solapur-Bijapur road within 24 hours,” Gadkari said while inaugurating the Tedhi Pulia flyover and laying the foundation stone for the Khuram Nagar flyover in Lucknow.

He further said that 21st-century politics is the politics of “Development “and promised to build infrastructure worth 111 lakh crore in the next five years which will be no less in quality than that of those in western European countries and America.

The thing to be noted is that the relationship between infrastructure development and Gadkari is not something new, his brainchild was India’s first access-controlled expressway the Mumbai-Pune Expressway which was built in the late 90s, and also the various arterial flyovers constructed in Mumbai when he was a state minister.

When he took the helm of affairs in 2014 approximately 400 stalled projects worth 3 Lakh crores were stuck up in various hurdles with Banks who had given loans to them staring at losses due to NPA’s but he quickly resolved the hurdles and pushed infra growth. Some of the upcoming projects to be finished include the Zozila tunnel, Char Dham highway, Kailash Highway, Mumbai-Delhi expressway.