The Economic Survey for 2019-20 noted that road construction has slowed down to 12.7 km per day as of September, 2019.
While road construction has been on a steady rise from 17 km per day in 2015-16 to 29.6 km per day in 2018-19, the sector has witnessed a slowdown in the first half of 2019-20.
The slow pace in road construction is largely due to subdued private sector interest in existing models and issues in land acquisition for highways. Private sector investment in roads sector stands at Rs 12,000 crore until September 2019.
The National Infrastructure Pipeline has said there will be infrastructure investment opportunities worth Rs 19 lakh crore in the roads sector for the period 2020-25.
The Roads Ministry awarded 2,103 highways and road projects until September 2019. During the same period, 4,622 highways and roads projects have been constructed.
The Survey states that road transport is the dominant mode of transportation in terms of its contribution to Gross Value Added (GVA) and traffic share.
The share of transport sector in the GVA for 2017-18 was about 4.77 percent of which the share of road transport is the largest at 3.06 percent, followed by railways (0.75 percent), air transport (0.15 percent) and water transport (0.06 percent).
Similarly, as per the National Transport Development Policy Committee Report, as of 2011-12, road transport is estimated to handle 69 percent and 90 percent of the countrywide freight and passenger traffic, respectively.
The Ministry of Road Transport & Highways (MoRTH) is mandated with the development and maintenance of road networks especially the National Highways as well as the implementation of the Motor Vehicle Act under which it formulates broad policies relating to road transport.
As of March 2018, India had a road network of about 59.64 lakh km. The total length of National Highways was 1.32 lakh km as on March 1, 2019.
