Bharatmala is a name given to ambitious road and highways project of Modi Government. The total investment for the Bharatmala plan is estimated at Rs10 trillion—the largest ever outlay for a government road construction scheme.
The ambitious ₹10-lakh-crore umbrella programme for roads, Bharatmala, will subsume all existing highway projects including the flagship National Highways Development Project (NHDP), launched by the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government in 1998.
The project will start from Gujarat and Rajasthan, move to Punjab and then cover the entire string of Himalayan states – Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand – and then portions of borders of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar alongside Terai, and move to West Bengal , Sikkim, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, and right up to the Indo-Myanmar border in Manipur and Mizoram.
Special emphasis will be given on providing connectivity to far-flung rural areas including the tribal and backward areas.
According to government officials working out the details of the scheme, the total road length to be developed as expressways under Bharatmala will be around 51,000km. In the first phase 29,000km will be developed with an outlay of Rs5.5 trillion.
The Public Investment Board has cleared the proposal for BHARATMALA Pariyojana Phase-I in its meeting held in June 2017. The total length of road to be constructed under BHARATMALA Pariyojana Phase-I is 24,800 Km with the following details:
Economic Corridors – 9,000 Km
Inter-corridor & feeder Routes – 6,000 Km
National Corridors Efficiency Programme – 5,000 Km
Border & International connectivity roads – 2,000 Km
Coastal & port connectivity roads – 2,000 Km
Expressways – 800 Km
Remaining National Highways under National
Highways Development Project (NHDP) – 10,000 Km