The Bharatmala Pariyojna ( 'India garland project') is a project in India implemented by Government of India. It is slated to interconnect 550 District Headquarters (from the current 300) through a minimum four-lane highway by raising the number of corridors to 50 (from the current six) and move 80% of freight traffic (40% currently) to national highways by interconnecting 24 logistics parks, 66 inter-corridors of total , 116 feeder routes of total and seven northeast multi-modal waterway ports. The project also includes the development of tunnels, bridges, elevated corridors, flyovers, overpasses, interchanges, bypasses, and ring roads, to provide the shortest, jam-free and optimized connectivity to multiple places. It is a centrally-sponsored and funded road and highways project of the Government of India.
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 committed new highways is estimated at , 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. Special emphasis will be given on providing connectivity to far-flung border and rural areas including the tribal and backward areas.
Other than NHDP related projects which are greenfield, there is Brownfield National Highway Projects which is an upgrade/widening of existing four-lane highways into six-lane highways that are not controlled access highways. Many state highways have been converted to National Highways under this project. It is both an 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, UDAN-RCS, Digital India, BharatNet, and Parvatmala.
Context
Size of Indian highway network
India's 6,617,100 km (4,111,675 mi) road network is the largest in the world, of which only 2% (~1,60,000 km) are national highways (NHs) carrying 40% road traffic.BHARATMALA PARIYOJANA, PHASE-I
Benefits of Bharatmala
Bharatmala will significantly boost highway infrastructure:
Raise six NC corridors to 50 corridors (6 NC and 44 EC) Raise 40% freight to 80% freight on national highways Raise 300 districts to 550 districts connected by minimum four-lane highways
Project components
Components summary
Bharatmala components or predecessors: Completed national road development connectivity older scheme Golden Quadrilateral Subsumed in Bharatmala National Highways Development Project National corridors Diamond Quadrilateral North-South and East-West Corridor Char Dham Highway India-China Border Roads, partially subsumed in Bharatmala and partially under Ministry of Defence
National Highways Development Project The NHDP project covers , including completed, under construction and left for award (as of May 2017). The uncompleted projects under NHDP will also be subsumed in Bharatmala. NHDP was meant to convert dirt roads into national highways or any 1/2 lane roads into four-lane national highways.
National corridors
National Corridors of India (NC) are six high volume corridors, including four in Golden Quadrilateral and 2 in North–South and East–West Corridors, including Mumbai - Kolkata Highway (NH6), known as East Coast - West Coast Corridor, that carry 35% of India's freight. Expansion to six to eight lanes, ring roads, bypasses and elevated corridors will be built in Bharatmala to decongest the National Corridors. Logistics Parks will be set up along the NC. Busiest stretches of National Corridors will be converted to the expressways. inter-corridor and feeder routes will be built. Additionally, of border roads and international highways will be built to connect six national corridors to international trade routes.
National Corridors Efficiency Program National Corridors Efficiency Program (NCEP) entails phase-I decongestion of 185 choke points by 34 6-8 laning, 45 bypasses and 30 ring roads of 6 NC.Investment approval for Phase 1
New ring roads in Bharatmala include:
Agra Amaravati Belgaum Bengaluru Berhampur Bhubaneswar Chitradurga Delhi Dhanbad Dhule Gurugram Indore Jabalpur Jaipur Kota Lucknow Madurai Nagpur Patna Pune Raipur Ranchi Sagar Sambalpur Shivpuri Solapur Surat Thiruvananthapuram Udaipur Varanasi Vijayawada
Northeast India connectivity
North East Economic corridor will connect seven state capitals and seven multimodal waterways terminals on Brahmaputra on the Bharatmala route.Bharatmala route (slide 21)
Dhubri Silghat Biswanath Ghat Neamati Dibrugarh Sengajan Oriyamghat
Economic corridors
44 economic corridors or industrial corridors of India, , were identified and will be taken up in phase-I. They exclude six national corridors.Bharatmala presentation 66 inter-corridors (IC) & 116 feeder routes (FR) were identified for Bharatmala.
List of national economic corridors
List of 44 economic corridors (EC):
EC-1: Mumbai-Kolkata EC-2: Mumbai-Kanyakumari EC-3: Amritsar-Jamnagar EC-4: Kandla-Sagar EC-5: Agra-Mumbai EC-6: Pune-Vijayawada EC-7: Raipur-Dhanbad EC-8: Ludhiana-Ajmer EC-9: Surat-Nagpur EC-10: Hyderabad-Panaji EC-11: Jaipur-Indore EC-12: Solapur-Nagpur EC-13: Sagar-Varanasi EC-14: Kharagpur-Siliguri EC-15: Raipur-Visakhapatnam EC-16: Delhi-Lucknow EC-17: Chennai-Kurnool EC-18: Indore-Nagpur EC-19: Chennai-Madurai EC-20: Mangaluru-Raichur EC-21: Tuticorin-Cochin EC-22: Solapur-Bellary-Gooty EC-23: Hyderabad-Aurangabad EC-24: Delhi-Kanpur EC-25: Tharad-Phalodi EC-26: Nagaur-Mandi Dabwali EC-27: Sagar-Lucknow EC-28: Sambalpur-Paradeep EC-29: Amreli-Vadodra EC-30: Godhra-Khargone EC-31: Sambalpur-Ranchi EC-32: Bengaluru-Malappuram EC-33: Raisen-Pathariya EC-34: Bengaluru-Mangaluru EC-35: Chittaurgarh-Indore EC-36: Bilaspur-New Delhi EC-37: Solapur-Mahabubnagar EC-38: Bengaluru-Nellore EC-39: Ajmer-Udaipur EC-40: Sirsa-Delhi EC-41: Sirohi-Beawar EC-42: Jaipur-Agra EC-43: Pune-Aurangabad EC-44: North East Corridor
Logistics parks Logistics parks entailing 45% of India's freight traffic have been identified to be connected by Bharatmala economic corridors, to develop hub-and-spoke model where hub-to-hub transport can be done with 30 tonne trucks and hub-to-spoke transport can be done with 10 tonne trucks. Currently all transport is point-to-point in 10 tonne trucks (2017).
Ambala Bengaluru Bathinda Bhopal Chennai Cochin Coimbatore Guwahati Hisar Hyderabad Indore Jagatsinghpur Jaipur Jammu Kandla Kolkata Kota Nagpur Nashik Panaji Patna Pune Raipur Rajkot Solan Sundargarh Valsad Vijayawada Visakhapatnam North Gujarat Ahmedabad Vadodara South Gujarat Surat Bharuch North Punjab Jalandhar Amritsar Gurdaspur Mukerian South Punjab Ludhiana Sangrur Patiala Delhi-NCR Delhi Faridabad (IMT Manesar) Narnaul (Nangal Choudhary IMHL) Ghaziabad MMR Mumbai Mumbai suburbs Jnpt Mumbai Port Thane Raigad
International economic corridors
India's neighbourhood
East of India: India's Act East policy connectivity will be further developed in the Bharatmala routes (slide 22) with several dozen 24 Integrated check posts (ICPs), transit through Bangladesh to improve Northeast India, and integrating Bangladesh–Bhutan–Nepal-Myanmar–Thailand BIMSTEC corridors. Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar (BCIM Economic Corridor) Mekong-Ganga Cooperation BIMSTEC projects, Bay of Bengal informal Economic Corridor Bangladesh Bhutan India Nepal Initiative (BBIN) India-Myanmar Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project India–Myanmar–Thailand Trilateral Highway Great Nicobar Island Development Project, including International Container Transshipment Port, Galathea Bay Thai Canal Sabang strategic port development, India-Indonesia project Dawei Port Project in Myanmar
West of India India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMAC)
Asia-wide
Asian Highway Network ASEAN–India Free Trade Area Trans-Asian Railway Hippie trail, defunct road route from UK to India-Singapore-Australia
Global
Build Back Better World, G7 rival to China's "One Belt, One Road" Free and Open Indo-Pacific With Russia East of India: Chennai–Vladivostok Maritime Corridor West of India: International North–South Transport Corridor, included Chabahar Port
Finance
Central Road Fund
Central Road Fund (CRF) was created as a non-lapsable fund under the Central Road Fund Act 2000, by imposing a cess on petrol and diesel, to build and upgrade national highways, state roads, rural roads, railway under/over bridges, and national waterways.What is Central Road Fund (CRF)?, Indian Economy.
Bharatmala Phase-I funds
Total phase-I budget for five years Bharatmala project from 2017 to 2022, including existing NH projects subsumed under Bharatmala, such as incomplete National Highways, SARDP-NE, Externally Aided Projects (EAP, e.g. world Bank and ADB), and Left Wing Extremism roads (LWE).new releaseTransport ministry seeks Rs 78,000 crore to help fund Bharatmala, Economic Times, 24 Dec 2017.
Implementation phases
NHIDCL
The National Highways and Infrastructure Development Corporation Limited was created in 2014 as a fully owned company of the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways by the Government of India to expedite construction of National Highway projects with specific focus on Northeast India.National Highway Infrastructure Development Corporation Limited to award first project for North-East in October, Economic Times, 9 Oct 9 2014.NHIDCL intro.
Phases
The plan envisages the construction of roads, including of additional highways and roads across the country, apart from an existing plan of building of new highways by the National Highway Authority of India. Bharatmala has synergy with Sagarmala.
Phase 1: 34,800 km
Bharatmala phase-I will raise the NH connection to a total of 80% or 550 districts out of a total of 718 districts from the current 42% or 300 districts connected to NH (as of Dec. 2017). Mapping of Shortest Route for 12,000 routes carrying 90% of India's freight, commodity-wise survey of freight movement across 600 districts, automated traffic surveys over 1,500+ points across the country, and satellite mapping of corridors was done to identify upgradation requirements for Bharatmala.
The total length of highways will be constructed under phase-I, including of new highways and another currently under-construction remaining incomplete under NHDP, compared to the 19 years it took to upgrade almost same length of national highways under NHDP.Nitin Gadkari press conference highlights: BharatMala, SagarMala to be 'varmala' of India, says minister, First Post, 25 Oct 2017.
Road type Total length Phase-I length NotesEconomic corridors 44 EC corridors exclude 6 NC.Inter-corridor & feeder routes 66 inter-corridors (IC) & 116 feeder routes (FR).National Corridors Efficiency Program 6-8 laning, bypasses and ring roads of 6 NC.Border & international connectivity roads of border roads and to connect 6 national corridors to international trade routes, such as BIMSTEC, MIT and BIN (Bangladesh-India-Nepal).Coastal & port connectivity roads Synergy with Sagarmala.Expressways NC stretches converted to expressway.Total under Bharatmala Pariyojana NH remaining under NHDP Total to be built or upgraded
Phase-II: 48,877 km