Government may slow down declaring more state highways as National Highways

NEW DELHI: In a major policy change, the Centre is preparing a model to provide financial assistance to state govts for one-time improvement of state highways rather than declaring more of these as NHs.

The road transport ministry will instead focus on building more new greenfield highways and expressways.This comes after PM Narendra Modi's direction to the ministry to come up with a model by July end for the purpose. State govts will maintain the upgraded state highways. TOI has learnt that in the last infrastructure review meeting, Modi had asked the ministry to come up with innovative models for supporting state highway projects and connecting non-major ports under state govts.This change in approach gains importance considering that in the last 11 years, govt has notified conversion of 55,000 km of state highways to NHs and now, the total length of NHs stands at 1.46 lakh km. This has been highlighted as one of the biggest achievements of govt.Sources said that after expanding the NH network, now there is a need to focus more on widening them and maintaining them. Data shows that till March, India has more than 63 lakh km of road network.