The implementation of Bharatmala project will put 250 more districts on four-lane highway map, connecting a total of 550 districts, apart from decongesting cities, connecting ports and economic corridors, the Highway Ministry officials said.

The Highway Ministry will be seeking more funds from the Finance Ministry to ensure faster completion.

“For every ₹1 lakh crore to be used, the Highway Ministry expects a budgetary support of about ₹25,000 crore,” said Nitin Gadkari, Minister for Road Transport and Highways.

The gross budgetary support for Bharatmala programme and existing schemes between 2017-18 and 2021-22 is estimated at ₹2,37,024 crore from Central Road Fund, ₹59,973 crore as budgetary support, ₹34,000 crore from expected monetisation of toll-operate-transfer projects.

All the projects constructed through engineering procurement construction will be monetised and will be bid out for 15 years.

The highway network was identified by using the most efficient shorter route to connect high traffic origin-destination pairs, said the Road Transport and Highways Secretary Yudhvir Singh Malik, speaking at a conference here on Wednesday.

He added that to implement the Bharatmala project, powers will be delegated to the National Highways Authority of India Board, which can now undertake engineering procurement construction projects on a faster basis.

The Ministry will be developing greenfield highways where acquiring land along existing highways will be difficult.

On the target of constructing 10,000 km of highways a year, Gadkari said while NHAI expects achieve 6,000 km a year, and hopes to meet the target as they have the capacity.

For the Bharatmala network, the route alignments were identified after taking into account commodity-wise survey of freight movement across 600 districts. The networks were identified after taking into account high traffic origin-destination pairs.

Under the programme, several projects have been planned to decongest cities by building bypasses. In this context, he said that the eastern peripheral expressway (EPE), which will take big trucks away from Delhi, will be completed over the next one-two months.

The first phase is of 24,800 km, apart from 10,000 km of national highways development programme will be completed. The detailed project reports for 24,800 km are at an advanced stage, and the DPR of remaining 7,000 km will be awarded soon.

There is likely to be 20-25 per cent improvement in average speed of road network, and a drop in supply chain costs by around five-six per cent.

He added that safety record will be improved, cutting deaths on highways by 50 per cent.

“We will roll out most of the projects announced by the government before December 2018.

“The entire programme will be transparent, corruption-free with full emphasis on quality. Each and every work will be through electronic tenders and the quality of highways would be such that they would see no potholes for the next 100 years,” Gadkari said.