Centre shifts highway strategy to elevated corridors, ring roads, bypasses around 50 large cities

The shift marks a departure from the earlier emphasis on long inter-city corridors under programmes such as Bharatmala, towards integrating highways with urban mobility needs.

According to the first person quoted above, the new approach of the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) will ensure that long-distance highway traffic is diverted outside dense city cores, enabling seamless freight movement while reducing congestion within cities. The broader objective is to lower logistics costs and support investment and growth.

As per government estimates, the country’s logistics cost has already fallen from 13–14% of GDP a few years ago to close to 8% now, driven by GST reforms, FASTag, e-way bills, digital tracking systems, and the expansion of highways and freight corridors under PM Gati Shakti.

Queries mailed to MoRTH and NHAI remained unanswered till press time.

MoRTH has been provided a record capex allocation of ₹2.94 trillion for 2027, which includes construction of 10,000 km of national highways, including 3,000 km each of access-controlled high-speed corridors and highway bypasses and ring roads.

The decongestion strategy would first focus on completing work around 47 million-plus cities as per the 2011 population census, the second person said. This would be followed by similar projects around cities with a population of 5 lakh or more.

“We have already done some work on bypasses and ring road systems in few of the million plus cities. Work is on to identify stretches along cities where such road network would be required,” the second person added.

“Projects such as the Urban Extension Road (UER) demonstrate how peri-urban infrastructure can unlock capacity without overburdening existing city networks. Given company’s experience in executing large, complex road projects across geographies, we see strong execution opportunities in such integrated corridor developments,” the spokesperson added.'

As of early 2026, India's national highway network has reached approximately 1,46,572 km, representing a 61% growth from 91,287 km in 2014. Four-lane and above highways have expanded to 43,512 km, and operational expressways exceed 3,000 km.

Despite modern infrastructure promising speeds of 100–120 kmph, average vehicle speeds on national highways hover around 50 kmph due to congestion, mixed traffic and bottlenecks.

According to Vivek Agarwal, partner and head, public infrastructure, KPMG in India, the draft Urban Decongestion Policy also reflects that national highway bottlenecks within fast-growing cities are now a key constraint on mobility and logistics efficiency.

“Using bypasses, ring roads and elevated corridors, aligned with urban master plans offers a structured way to separate through-traffic from local movement and ease chronic congestion,” he said.

Additionally, innovative and targeted demand-side interventions such as congestion pricing, parking reform and transit priority can augment the impact of large infrastructure projects like the UER. Experience from Stockholm, Gothenburg, Milan and Singapore shows that such interventions reduced congestion. The strategy is therefore right in principle, but its success depends on disciplined, system-level execution rather than scale alone, Agarwal said.

“The Vision 2047 plan marks a shift from corridor-centric expansion to a network-based, cluster-driven approach aligned to freight flows and major economic centres,” said Suprio Banerjee of ICRA. “It recognises that bottlenecks at city entry and exit points are constraining highway efficiency and pushing up logistics costs.”