Conversion of highways into expressways

 It is a simpler, faster, and considerably inexpensive way to achieve our national objectives of a balanced, ecologically sustainable, and accelerated economic growth with significant favourable implications for India’s international stature. It would also help in addressing the highly complex challenges of climate change, atmospheric pollution, and, lately, national efforts towards fighting pandemics. The Prime Minister has given a high prominence to infrastructure in the government strategy for accelerated socio-economic growth for the country.

The cities having become the dynamos of India’s growth today, the migration of the population from the villages across the length and breadth over long distances defines the country’s social and economic life. The successful reversal of these migration flows can launch India on an accelerated growth path in addition to helping in better governance of the cities which are presently becoming... This phenomenon of uncontrolled urban migration is also reflective of poor agricultural growth and limited rural employment and skills’ development opportunities. Hosting nearly 63% of the population, an uneconomic and unsustainable agrarian sector--16% of national Gross Domestic Product (GDP) requires massive financial subventions. In the United Kingdom, by way of illustration, 17% of the population (mostly elderly) is rural with agriculture sector constituting 0.61% of its GDP.This lopsided economic growth is manifest in huge numbers of migrant labour in urban centres,

The current policy of building high-profile expressways over long and short distances has generated its own kinds of problems. First of all, these projects require huge capital costs with considerable time-overruns and their return is often not realistically calculated for such capital expenditure. Then, there is also the fear in the rural population that their meagre landholdings will be taken away for construction of expressways connecting major cities and bringing little economic growth to the surrounding countryside. This is combined with pressure from the builders who create townships along these expressways and, thus, further putting pressure on the limited – adjoining – fertile agricultural land...Within metropolitan cities with metro services, inner-city bus services should be discontinued due to their gross underutilisation even at peak time adding further to the traffic mayhem; instead, 15-20 seater, comfortable buses can be introduced on a radius of half distance between two metro stations to pick up and drop passengers to the nearby metro station...It can be suggested, by way of a general approach to our road construction programme, that this can be done by converting into expressways the existing highways radiating out of the major cities. Today, most of these highways are, at least, double lanes in both directions. By adding a shoulder to these carriageways for emergency vehicle movement for police or ambulances or for breakdowns, enclosing it by sturdy railing, and by construction of exit-ways at suitable distances for this fast-moving vehicle traffic to get out of the expressway onto the country road or vice versa, these highways can be converted into expressways. These expressways would, basically, comprise one lane for slower traffic and another one for faster/overtaking vehicles.At the same time, since expressways have a legally enforceable minimum speed limit below which vehicles cannot be driven, a complementary, connecting network of country roads for the slow-moving traffic is required... Substituting the policy of highways for such clusters by development of a network of expressways with complementary country roads would lead to better economic integration of regional towns with the surrounding agrarian countryside. These integrated regional clusters are scalable to the national level through this process.

The outcomes would be the same as those seen in other countries, especially the developed ones, which have created a network of expressways and country roads. Yet, the accelerated and relatively inexpensive creation of such infrastructure would immediately improve the quality of governance in the cities and, due to easier and extensive access to the outlying areas, of the surrounding towns and villages.