From April 1, the concept of measuring the length of highways have changed, road transport Minister Nitin Gadkari said. Experts and government officials say that this change in measurement would better capture the actual length of highways built in the country.
The lane-kilometre method that has been introduced in place of traditional linear length method involves measuring the length of each new lane that is built instead of counting the overall length of the highway. For example, if a highway has four separate lanes of 1km, then the length of the highway will be 4 km.
“This is a more realistic assessment of the total length that has been constructed. It is an internationally adopted norm… countries like the United States follow this standard,” Gadkari said, as reported by Hindustan Times.
“Building a two-lane highway with paved shoulder costs anywhere between Rs 6 crore to Rs 8 crore per km. The per km cost shoots up anywhere between Rs 14 crore to Rs 20 crore for a four-lane highway. Our view was that this difference in cost and the effort should be reflected,” Union road secretary YS Malik said.
According to this new rule, the total length of highways constructed during 2017-18 fiscal comes to 34,378 km as against 9,829 km if counted linearly.
The National Highway Authority of India (NHAI) is supposed to meet today to decide the road construction target for 2017-18 on the basis of lane km.
