MoRTH plans state-level outreach to promote uniform highway development practices
The road ministry wants to take its way of building highways to the states and will send senior officials and engineers to state capitals to help raise road quality across the country, two people familiar with the matter said.
The ministry will share how it prepares project reports, awards contracts, plans expressways and builds green highways, and will back that up with technical help and training. Odisha, West Bengal and Bihar have already shown interest, one of the people said.
States are also being asked to use national digital tools for planning projects, tracking construction, acquiring land, reporting accidents and rating contractors.
The push follows earlier meetings with states, and more are planned. Industry consultants say shared standards could make the process more transparent, but caution that states face different problems and may not want to adopt central practices wholesale.
The Union ministry of road transport and highways (MoRTH) did not answer Mint’s emailed queries till the rime of going to press.
“The focus of infrastructure development is increasingly shifting towards quality, with the vision of Viksit Bharat requiring high-quality roads across urban and rural areas, state highways, national highways and expressways. Here, sharing of best practises would play an important role,” the second person said.
MoRTH intends to draw on its pool of experienced engineers and officials who have worked on road and highway development to provide technical guidance to state agencies.
Digital tools for states
The Centre wants states to use a set of shared digital tools such as PM GatiShakti that lets ministries and states plan projects on one map and spot clashes early and Data Lake that keeps track of how highway construction and quality checks are progressing. Bhoomi Rashi takes land acquisition online, and the contractor rating system scores firms on how they perform. The electronic Detailed Accident Report (eDAR) system, is another tool that pools accident data from police, transport, health and highway authorities, so officials can see which stretches of road are most dangerous and act on it.
Experts’ reactions to the strategy were mixed. Raghav Madan, a partner at Deloitte India, said better coordination among infrastructure agencies was essential, and that technology could help governments identify problems earlier and make decisions using reliable data rather than fragmented information. Common platforms and shared benchmarks could improve transparency, project appraisal, monitoring and accountability, he added.
Sanjay Kumar Sinha, founder and managing director of Chaitanya Projects Consultancy, said the initiative could improve consistency in project preparation, technical standards and performance evaluation. He stressed that the objective should be regulatory convergence through common templates, reporting standards and technical benchmarks, rather than complete uniformity across states.
The platforms’ effectiveness would depend on data quality, interoperability with existing state systems and the extent to which information informs actual decisions, Bhavik Vora, partner at Grant Thornton Bharat, said.
Kuljit Singh, partner and national infrastructure leader at EY India, cautioned that states face different challenges and may be reluctant to adopt central practices wholesale. Capacity building, training and addressing state-specific concerns would therefore be critical to the initiative’s success.
