After making a modest beginning, the government has ended the financial year with the second highest level of highway construction but it missed out on the target for the year by a wide margin.
According to official data, 12,349 km of highways were constructed in FY24, which is just lower than the record construction so far of 13,327 km reported in the pandemic year 2020-21. The government kept the FY24 construction target at a record 13,814 km, which the ministry of road transport and highways (MoRTH) later described as “aspirational” after failing to miss the construction target in the previous two financial years.
According to officials, the good part about the data for the last fiscal is that it contained 9,642 km of lane augmentation or capacity augmentation projects and not just strengthening projects (where no new highway is constructed but existing roads are repaired and strengthened). This accounted for over 4,900 km of the total 13,327 km constructed in record year FY21.
But FY24 saw the highest level of broader roads of over four lanes constructed at 5,193 km.
While highway construction has picked up pace last year relative to previous two years, MoRTH also used up its entire record capex provided by Budget FY24. This is the first time that spending has touched 99.93% of the revised capex of ₹2.64 trillion provided in the budget.
Officials said that capex spending of MoRTH has remained over 90% level in previous five years and in fact above 98% in three of the five years with the exception of FY20 when it was 91% and FY22 when it stayed at 93%.
Officials said that going forward the expectation is that in the current fiscal entire (100%) capex of ₹2.72 trillion provided in FY25 would be spent to build highways.
Officials also said that FY24 signalled a revival of private sector investment in highways with companies pitching in with around ₹35,000 crore investment, taking the overall capex spent to over ₹3 trillion.
Along with construction, highway awards also picked momentum in the last quarter of the last fiscal taking total awards to 8,581 km.
Officials said that the general elections will not slow down construction as there was a big pipeline of projects that should ensure roadworks will remain closer to FY24 levels in FY25.
Officials said they were targetting 12,000-13,000 km a year over the next decade after which overall construction may slow down a bit as most highways required in the country would have been built and the focus would shift to maintenance of new alignments.
Under the Vision 2047 plan, MoRTH is targeting to construct 50,000 km of access-controlled highways that according to officials would add more lane-km to the network as most of these would be 4-8 lane networks.
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