India Needs A New Highway Services Authority

Context: Whilst construction is an important cornerstone of the overall scheme of developing road networks, it has to be acknowledged that multiple dimensions of “service delivery” strongly suggest that India needs a new Highway Services Authority.

Need for a Highways Services Authority:

• The burden on the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI): While the NHAI has achieved a road construction capacity of 34 km/day recently, ensuring other aspects of the road may hamper the construction activities in future.
• Ensuring road safety: India accounts for 11% of global deaths in road accidents; according to the World Bank, India has about 4.5 lakh crashes per annum, in which 150,000 people die.
  • Road safety involves a chain of interventions from safety in design of roads, strict enforcement of traffic discipline, provision of emergency medical services, and vehicle safety features, as well as regulator route patrolling.
  • In April 2021, the Finance Ministry gave in-principle clearance for setting up a National Road Safety Board.
• Ensuring customer satisfaction: This comes from impeccable road maintenance and a hassle-free driving environment.
  • Poor driving experience includes lack of quality service delivery even after payment of tolls and lack of highway amenities.
• Adoption of technology: Transforming toll booths to GPS based collection system (as proposed by the minister in Parliament) require heightened modes of service integration.
  • Currently, the electronic toll collection is administered by a less-visible company called the Indian Highways Management Company Limited.
• Ensuring inter-modality: Increasing the penetration of RORO (Roll-on/Roll-off) services with railways, on trunk routes and developing linkages with inland waterways and coastal shipping.
  • Recently, the NHAI has constituted a new company called the National Highways Logistics Management Company to oversee multi-model logistics parks and port-connectivity projects.
• Disaster management: There are always incidences of heavy snowfall, floods, landslides, earthquakes or, nowadays, even long-drawn out public agitations blocking road usage.
• Land acquisition: Concepts such as betterment levies, land-banking, value-capture financing need to be adopted and implemented.
  • Aspects like ribbon-development rights, as well as auctioning of exit points off access-controlled highways, have also often been discussed; but not implemented.