What is the situation of roads in India?

Any person landing in one of the international airports in India having visited any of the countries west of Afghanistan or east of Burma would notice as soon as they come outside the airport that the roads are very bad. To start with there will be a lot of pot holes that must have been there for years. They will also note that the surface is very uneven giving a bumpy ride. They will notice that the pedestrian ways by the side of the roads are not paved and a lot of digging here and there with dug up mud piled without any warning or enclosure for either pedestrians or for the traffic. All these will be noticeable for the person landing in India within a couple of kilometres of travel outside of the airport. After that let them go to any where in India, this would be a common site. They will notice that the Highways are not really anything like Highways, interstate roads, state roads, city roads and rural roads are all even worse. There are now some stretches of roads that have 4 lanes with barrier between the opposite directions of traffic. Even these are poor by international standards in terms of their safety, surface, junctions and crossings and so on.

Safe speeds in the highways are about 70 to 80km per hour(44 to 50 miles per hour). Even at this speed one will have to be extremely cautious as the chance of unexpected is a certainty e.g. a sudden bump or a sudden hole anywhere on the road, sudden road crossing by pedestrians and animals, sudden crossing by other traffic. Hence the average speed on a 100 km(62.5miles) journey would come down to a mere 50 km per hour(32miles per hour) there by taking 2 hours to complete the journey.


So on the whole the situation of roads in India is very bad.

Just imagine the amount of fuel consumption for these journeys. A road of international standard would easily reduce the fuel consumption by half. The life of the vehicle would certainly be doubled. The repair costs would be halved. More over, the number of accidents that result in loss of life could be reduced to at least to a quarter of the current number. Just the last advantage alone would pay for the cost of improving the roads. So there is no doubt that the current situation of roads is costing India heavily. So the current way of designing and building roads is proving very expensive. The way to cut the costs is not by cutting the corners in planning, building and maintaining the roads to achieve the sort of roads we have now, but by ensuring that we achieve international standard roads by appropriate investment, equipment, materials, planning, construction and maintenance.