National highways of India

A dual carriageway section of NH 48 connecting Delhi to Gurgaon

India has 142,126 km (88,313 mi) of National Highways as of April 2019.[1]

National Highways constituted 2.7% of India's total road network, but carried about 40% of road traffic, as of 2013.[2] In 2016, the government vowed to double the highway length from 96,000 to 200,000 km.[3]

The majority of existing highways are two-lane roads (one lane in each direction), though much of this is being expanded to four or more lanes. Some sections of the network are toll roads. Only a few highways are built with concrete. Bypasses have been constructed around larger towns and cities to provide uninterrupted passage for highway traffic. Some existing roads have been reclassified as National Highways.

The National Highways Act, 1956[4] provided for private investment in the building and maintenance of the highways.

The National Highways Authority of India was established by the National Highways Authority of India Act, 1988. Section 16(1) of the Act states that the function of NHAI is to develop, maintain, and manage the National Highways and any other highways vested in, or entrusted to, it by the Government of India.

In 1998 India launched a massive program of highway upgrades, called the National Highways Development Project (NHDP), in which the main north–south and east–west corridors and highways connecting the four metropolitan cities (Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata) have been fully paved and widened into four-lane highways. Some of the busier National Highway sectors in India were also converted to four- or six-lane limited-access highways.

The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways adopted a new systematic numbering of National Highways in April 2010.[5] It is a systematic numbering scheme based on the orientation and the geographic location of the highway. The new system indicates the direction of National Highways whether they are east–west (odd numbers) or north–south (even numbers). It also indicates the geographical region where they are with even numbers increasing from east to west starting from NH2 and odd numbers increasing from north to south starting from NH1.[6]

Bharatmala, a centrally-sponsored and funded road and highways project of the Government of India [7] with a target of constructing 83,677 km (51,994 mi)[8] of new highways, has been started in 2018. Phase I of the Bharatmala project involves the construction of 34,800 km of highways (including the remaining projects under NHDP) at an estimated cost of ₹5.35 lakh crore (US$75 billion) by 2021-22.[9]

• The longest National Highway is NH44,[15] which runs between Srinagar in Jammu and Kashmir and Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu, covering a distance of 3,806 km (2,365 mi).
• The shortest National Highway is NH966B,[16][17] which spans 6 km (3.7 mi), from Ernakulam to Kochi in Kerala.
• The Leh–Manali Highway connecting Leh in Ladakh to Manali in Himachal Pradesh is the world's second highest-altitude motorable highway.

• List of National Highways in India by highway number
• List of National Highways in India by state
• List of National Highways in India by union territory
• India–Myanmar–Thailand Trilateral Highway
• Roads in India

Wikimedia Commons has media related to National highways in India.

• Story of a village by the highways