Union Minister Nitin Gadkari ‘guarantees’ US-like roads in India by 2024

Nitin Gadhkari said the Transport Ministry is also looking at several new technologies to replace toll plazas in order to reduce traffic snarls at these points.

The government will construct 26 green express highways by 2024 and bring down travel time between key cities across the country, Union Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari told Rajya Sabha on Wednesday.

Once the highways are completed, travel time from Delhi to Dehradun, Haridwar and Jaipur will be reduced to two hours, Gadkari said. Citing more examples, he told the members, “Delhi to Chandigarh will take two-and-a-half hours, Delhi to Amritsar four hours, and you will be able to do Delhi-Mumbai in 12 hours. By 2024, I guarantee that roads in India will be like those in the United States.”

He said the Transport Ministry is also looking at several new technologies to replace toll plazas in order to reduce traffic snarls at these points.

Starting that the government is looking at two new options for toll collection, Gadkari said the first is a satellite-based system, through which GPS in a vehicle will help toll to be directly deducted from the vehicle owner’s bank account. “The other option is the numberplate,” he said. “From 2019, we started the new numberplate with a new technology.… There will be a computerised system by which we can use the software, and we will collect toll.”

He said the system will register the point where a vehicle enters a toll highway, and thereafter register the point where it exits it; toll will be deducted from the owner’s account for the kilometres the car is driven on the highway. He said the ministry is yet to zero in on the technology to be used but it will be selected “as early as possible — within a month”.