New Delhi: The National Highway Authority of India (NHAI)’s outstanding liabilities were reduced to around ₹2,84,521 crore in the current fiscal year from ₹3,35,173 crore in 2023-24, the expenditure budget released on Saturday showed even though the budget speech by finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman made no mention of the highway sector.
The target for FY 25-26 has been kept at ₹2,72,101 crore.
A NHAI official said that this is in line with NHAI’s monetisation plan, and the debt reduction was primarily through National Highways Infra Trust (NHIT), the Infrastructure Investment Trust to shed high interest loans from commercial banks. The budgetary allocation for the whole of ministry of road transport and highways (MoRTH) for FY 2026 did not see any substantial change from last year.
MoRTH has been given ₹2.87 lakh crore for the next fiscal. The revised estimate for this FY is ₹2.81 lakh crore while the budgetary estimate was ₹2.78 lakh crore. The revised estimate is consistent with the trend of the ministry utilising more than the budgeted amounts. Notably, in 2022-23, the actual expenditure of the Ministry was 9% more than the budget estimates.
These allocations follow the ministry’s trend of lowering its construction targets for National Highways from 2019-20. Earlier in January, it was reported how the pace of construction of national highways dipped sharply in the current financial year and is poised to be the slowest since 2016-17 going by MoRTH’s data. The daily average for FY2023-24 was 33.83km, with 12,349 national highways laid in total. In contrast, only 5,853km of highways were laid until December 2024 in the current fiscal, resulting in a daily construction of 21.28km, a drop of 37% year-on-year.
{{/usCountry}}These allocations follow the ministry’s trend of lowering its construction targets for National Highways from 2019-20. Earlier in January, it was reported how the pace of construction of national highways dipped sharply in the current financial year and is poised to be the slowest since 2016-17 going by MoRTH’s data. The daily average for FY2023-24 was 33.83km, with 12,349 national highways laid in total. In contrast, only 5,853km of highways were laid until December 2024 in the current fiscal, resulting in a daily construction of 21.28km, a drop of 37% year-on-year.
{{/usCountry}}However, the economic survey released on Friday noted that the length of high-speed corridors increased from 93 km in 2014 to 2,474 km in 2024 while 4-lane and above - National Highways grew approximately 2.5 times, from about 18,300 km to 45,900 km between 2014 and 2024.