2024 will be an extremely consequential year for India. Indians will elect a new government in less than five months, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi remains the frontrunner to win the polls by a wide margin. Morning Consult has once again found that Modi is the world’s most popular leader, with a 76 per cent approval rating. PM Modi’s lead in the upcoming Lok Sabha polls is not without good reason. From a country that accepted mediocrity in governance to one that now wants a lot more, India is transforming as we know it.
Since 2014, the Modi government’s primary focus has been on building resilient infrastructure that aids India’s economic growth. The development on the ground is visible, and therefore, it is not odd that Modi remains the most-favoured Prime Ministerial candidate even after 10 years in power. The people want India’s development trajectory to continue unscathed, and the popular sentiment is that Modi is the man who can ensure that.
Take the case of Ayodhya, for starters. As the nation gears up for the inauguration of the Ram Mandir, Ayodhya is the city at the centre of all attention. On December 30 last year, PM Modi dedicated a swanky new airport and a revamped railway station to Ayodhya. That was just the tip of the iceberg. The prime minister proceeded to dedicate development projects amounting to more than Rs 15,700 crore across Uttar Pradesh. Out of this sum, Rs 11,100 crore has been tailored for Ayodhya’s development alone. Roads leading up to the Ram Mandir have been expanded and beautified alongside old ashrams, ancient ponds and temples across the town. Vande Bharat and Amrit Bharat trains – symbols of a new India – will run to and from Ayodhya as well.
Ayodhya offers a sneak peek into the kind of development that is taking place across the country. Today, infrastructure building is happening across the length and breadth of India at a scale that was previously deemed impossible, given the reputation India had prior to 2014. From being a country riddled not very long ago with insurmountable red-tapism, corruption and policy paralysis, India is today seen as a country determined to achieve glory.
This year alone, India will see some mega infrastructure projects getting inaugurated, especially in the run-up to the Lok Sabha polls. Reported by News18, at least five landmark projects are set to be inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the next two months. The five big projects on the PM’s table are the world’s highest rail bridge in J&K – Chenab Bridge, the Mumbai Trans Harbour Link, the stretch of Delhi-Mumbai expressway falling in Gujarat, the Dwarka Expressway in Delhi and the Agra Metro to the Taj Mahal.
Besides these, this year will also see the completion of big-ticket projects like the Navi Mumbai International Airport, Noida Airport, Aqua Line 3 of the Mumbai metro network and the Mumbai coastal road. Besides these, the Trans-Arunachal Highway, Sela Tunnel and Ahmedabad-Dholera Expressway are also nearing completion.
India’s Road Revolution
A hallmark of India’s incredible infrastructure push is the focus on not just expanding road networks across the country, but ensuring that they are among the best in the world. For a country to turn the fate of its economy around and ensure a ‘developed’ future for itself, it is a prerequisite to have a robust and high-quality network of roads. Today, India has the world’s second-largest road network, behind only the United States. When it comes to road networks, India has left China behind – and that has been made possible by the work done over the past 10 years.
The road network length in India at present stands at about 63.31 lakh km. The numbers speak for themselves. In 2014, the total length of National Highways was 91,287 km. In 2022-23, this length went up to 1,45,240 km, registering a staggering 59 per cent rise in just nine years. The pace of construction of national highways has increased six-fold since 2010. Similarly, the length of four-lane National Highways has doubled from 18,371 km in 2014 to 44,654 km now. The goal for this year is to build 13,800 km of highways – the highest-ever target set by the country.
The pace at which roads are being built has also witnessed a remarkable upswing. In 2014-15, about 12 km of roads were built every day. By 2021-22, the rate of road construction went up to 29 km per day. Also, since 2014, more than 350,000 km of rural roads have been made under the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana. This has played a crucial role in making India’s villages accessible round-the-year, which is naturally having a positive impact on India’s rural economy.
A report titled ‘The Indian Roads and Highways Sector’, released last year by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) pointed out that there has been a large increase in average annual award length and average annual road construction length between 2015 and 2022. It also notes that expressways have emerged as a favoured option when it comes to giving India’s road network a facelift. Union Minister of Road Transport and Highways, Nitin Gadkari has predicted that India’s road infrastructure will rival that of the United States in the next five years.
The Ministry of Road Transport & Highways is developing 27 Greenfield corridors, including five expressways of 9,860 km in length, at a total cost of Rs 4.08 lakh crore. The focus on Greenfield corridors is especially consequential, since these pass through uninhabited and underdeveloped areas, they will prove instrumental in ushering progress in new regions that will, in turn, boost the local economy. For example, in the Northeast alone, the Modi government has sanctioned national highway projects worth nearly Rs 3 lakh crore since 2014.
Robust infrastructure in border areas is a strategic asset for any country, and India understands this well. All along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), India has ramped up infrastructure development in an unprecedented way. In just the past two years, 205 projects have been completed along the LAC. The Modi government has increased the budget for the Border Roads Organisation (BRO) by a whopping 100 per cent. This year, the BRO is working on projects worth Rs 16,000 crore, including roads, bridges and tunnels, and airfields.
It was in 1956 that the then US President, Dwight D Eisenhower understood the importance of building roads to give momentum to a country’s economic rise. He facilitated the creation of America’s interstate highway system. Today, India is undergoing a similar road revolution that will propel efficient and rapid travel while also spurring economic development by connecting urban centres, rural areas, and everything in between.
The Changing Face of India’s Railways and Airways
Roads, while an important component of India’s ongoing infra push, are not the sole focus of the Modi government. The holistic upgradation of India’s railways and aviation sector figures quite prominently on the government’s policy priorities as well. There is a reason why PM Modi is himself flagging off Vande Bharat trains, which are now operational on 25 routes across the country.
The Vande Bharat and Amrit Bharat trains represent the changing face of Indian Railways. From the slow, unclean and unpunctual trains of yesteryears, to the swanky, high-speed and modern Vande Bharat trains now, India’s railways are undergoing a much-needed transformation. This transformation has been made possible because the Modi government decided that the Railways needed a major upgrade to better suit the needs of the country as it progresses on the developmental path with the goal of a ‘Viksit Bharat’ in mind.
Investment in railway infrastructure has shown consistent growth in the last five years, reaching Rs 2.4 lakh crore in the current fiscal. The electrification of railway tracks is almost complete, covering 37,011 route kilometres in the past nine years. India will have a fully electrified rail network in a matter of months now, and that is a big deal.
Additionally, the deployment of KAVACH automatic train collision avoidance system will increase to 5,000 kilometres per year by 2025-26, with the Delhi-Mumbai and Delhi-Howrah routes all set to have 100 per cent deployment of the system by March 2025. The focus, therefore, is as much on safety as it is on upgrading the railways’ look and feel. The railways are also working on a mega expansion plan that will make the infamous “waitlists” history. The plan involves rolling out 3,000 more trains in the next 3-4 years and increasing the number of trains that run daily to 13,000. To accommodate these trains, a network of 4,000-5,000 km track will be laid out every year.
Speaking of railways, the ongoing metro boom in India cannot be ignored. Approximately 462 kilometres of metro rail is currently under construction, 372-kilometre routes have been approved, while another 1,056 kilometres have been proposed. This will take India’s cumulative metro rail network to about 2,750 kilometres. Thereafter, India will have the world’s second-largest metro rail network.
Remember, in 2014, only five Indian cities had metro rail. Today, that number has gone up to 20. Similarly, in 2014, India had a 248-kilometre-long metro network in total. In nine years, the length of metro networks in India has gone up to 870 kilometres. Before 2014 the monthly average of metro lines was 0.68 km which has increased to 5.6 km per month.
One of the biggest achievements of the Modi government has been the democratisation of air travel in India. Prime Minister Modi had once said that it was his dream to make air travel possible for even those who wear slippers. In the past one year alone, India has seen five new airports and terminals being opened, taking the number of operational airports to 150. The Modi government aims to take this number up to 220 by 2025. In 2014, India had just 74 operational airports. India is also the world’s fastest-growing aviation market.
Industry insiders see the broad trend. It is therefore not surprising that Air India and IndiGo have placed mammoth orders for new aircraft, with the former ordering 470 planes from Boeing and Airbus, and the latter ordering 500 planes from Airbus. Akasa Air, the latest entrant in the Indian aviation market, is expected to place an order with Boeing for 150 aircraft soon. The mood in the sector is obviously very bullish, and the mega aircraft orders will play a critical role in making India the next aviation superpower of the world.
Bharat’s Time to Shine
Infrastructure is expected to become the biggest contributor to India’s economic growth. The Centre plans to invest Rs 143 lakh crore on infrastructure between 2024 and 2030. That is double of what India has spent on infrastructure in the past seven years. This is all part of Prime Minister Modi’s goal of making India a developed nation by 2047.
Is the transformation underway in India a coincidence? Morgan Stanley has a different take on the matter. The American Investment Bank says India’s key policy decisions since 2014, including supply-side reforms, formalisation of the economy, real estate regulation, digitising social transfers, insolvency and bankruptcy reforms, focus on FDI and a host of others are having a transformative impact on the Indian economy.
Morgan Stanley has also predicted that India’s manufacturing capacity will reach $1,500 billion by 2032 as compared to $447 billion in 2022. Its export market share is expected to more than double to 4.5 per cent by 2031, as compared to 2.2 per cent in 2021. Similarly, India’s per capita income is expected to more than double to about $5,200 by 2032.
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Driven by a rise in housing demand and massive state spending on infrastructure, India’s construction sector is booming too. This sector, according to consultancy firm Knight Frank, could add up to 30 million jobs by March 2030 to the current 70 million.
Today, India’s massive infrastructure push is being powered by the PM Gati Shakti Masterplan. The buzzword in the power corridors of New Delhi is now “multimodal connectivity”, which is why there has been a significant push towards increasing the share of inland waterways, ports and railways in India’s logistics sector.
India wants to exert greater maritime heft around the world and to ensure that, it is necessary for the country to have modern ports that can handle increased volumes of cargo. The average turnaround time at major ports has fallen from 127 hours in 2010-11 to 53 hours as of 2021-22. Major ports have added more than 100 million tonnes in additional traffic since 2014-15, which translates into an increase of roughly 24 per cent. Port capacity since 2014, meanwhile, has grown by 83 per cent or more than 700 million tonnes.
We are still to see the true size and scale of the transformation India is going through. In the coming years, as more and more infrastructure projects get completed and even more ambitious ones are taken up, India will have shed its reputation of being a country that cannot make the wheels of development turn. Instead, it will be seen as a country that embarked on a stunning infrastructure journey to complement the rise of its economic stature.
After all, India is expected to become the world’s third-largest economy by 2027. It is only befitting for the country’s infrastructure to represent this economic rise.
Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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