India rushing to improve its highway system
First publishedin World Highways
A section of the NH 76 between Udaipur and Chittorgarh
Despite the world economic slowdown, India still seems in a rush to improve its highway system as Patrick Smith reports
Later this year India will be seen by hundreds of millions worldwide when the country's capital New Delhi hosts its biggest event ever.
This huge nation, with the tourist tag of Incredible India, is playing host for the first time to the 19th Commonwealth Games
, which involves competitors from 53 countries.
The country's costliest event ever has been years in the planning, and the government has spent billions constructing and upgrading transportation, accommodation, security and electricity in readiness for the spectacle which takes place from 3-14 October at New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium. Costing an estimated US$1.6 billion to host, this means they are the most expensive Commonwealth Games ever.
And such is the country's pride in its efforts that along with the top-rated facilities, athletes will receive a free trip to the wonder monument Taj Mahal, courtesy of the Indian Government. The 'Eighth Wonder of the World' usually charges a much higher premium for non-Indian visitors.
Although New Delhi, with a population of some 15 million, already has many international features of a modern and well-planned city, the government has taken many further steps to improve it, not least in the area of transport.
A four-lane, 2.2km underground stretch from the Ring Road to Lodhi, linking the Games Village to the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium, will reduce athletes' travelling time between the village and the stadium; new road underbridges and overbridges along railway lines have been built, and to expand road infrastructure, flyovers, cloverleaf flyovers, and bridges have been constructed, while road-widening projects have been carried out, with an emphasis on expanding the existing National Highways. To improve traffic flow on existing roads plans are underway to make both the inner and outer ring roads signal free.
High-capacity bus corridors will be operational, and the Delhi Metro
is being expanded to accommodate more people and boost the use of public transport during the Games when the city will have the second longest network in the world (and later the longest) at more than 420km. To achieve this increase in the network's length 14 tunnel boring machines (TBMs) have been deployed: no country in Asia is said to have ever put to work so many TBMs at the same time.
The city's Indira Gandhi International Airport is being modernised, expanded, and upgraded and a new US$1.94 billion Terminal 3 will have been constructed with the capability to cater to more than 37 million passengers a year (World Highways January/February 2009) and the planned expansion programme will increase its capacity to handle 100 million passengers by 2030. Capable of handling 75 flights/hr its runway at more than 4.4km will be one of Asia's longest, and the entire airport will be connected to the city via a six-lane highway (National Highway 8) and the Delhi Metro.
Group, which recently delivered further asphalt plants in India, and which has a branch office and wholly-owned sales subsidiary in the country, also supplied two Marini
MAP plants (200 and 260tonnes/hr) to contractor L&T to produce 650,000tonnes of asphalt in six months for the airport, the largest production capacity ever installed in India. L&T achieved the target with around 100,000tonnes each month.
Group company Breining
also supplied three slurry pavers to upgrade Delhi streets in preparation for the Games.
India is, understandably, expected to use the Games to provide a major boost to tourism. According to official estimates, 2 million foreign tourists and 3.5 million domestic tourists are likely to arrive in Delhi in 2010 as a result of the Games, and the government is providing tax incentives for hotel rooms to be constructed in India, with a focus on the comparatively nearby tourist regions of Agra (Taj Mahal) and Jaipur (the 'Pink City').
All this means that for the past few years, vast swathes of Delhi have been huge construction sites, but then this could be said of much of the country, certainly in terms of public facilities and transportation, particularly highways.
And to cater for this construction bonanza many of the world's major construction manufacturers such as Atlas Copco
Construction Equipment and Wirtgen
have invested heavily in local manufacturing facilities over the years. It is understood Caterpillar is planning to strengthen local manufacturing in India by investing in its current production facilities.
MSK Projects (India), in joint venture with Chetak Enterprises and BSBK, has a big fleet of Volvo equipment and is carrying out upgrading to four lanes of the Bhopal-Dewas road project in Madhya Pradesh
Chinese company LiuGong Machinery is opening a manufacturing facility in India on a 177,000m² site at Pritampur near Indore in central India, an area that is home to many international companies. It will be the first facility LiuGong has opened outside of China, and it is being developed in stages. By 2012 LiuGong intends to have invested $30 million at the site. Initially the factory will build wheeled loaders weighing from 1.5-8tonnes.
JCB says that its three factories in India make it the company's biggest single operation.
Jay Singh, managing director of Volvo India says that 'one size fits all' solutions do not work in India, and they need to be adapted to the local customer needs.
"We need to address the evolving and more mature market needs. Having the road machinery plant in Bangalore to serve our growing Indian market gives us a position to take advantage of the attractive road development situation and the hundreds of projects that will become valid thanks to the government's investment drive." One area dealers are excited about is the huge potential offered by rental, with only a few major players offering rental to customers.
India's construction equipment market is dominated by backhoe loaders that represent more than a third of all unit sales today and forecasted to still equate to 34% of the total market by 2013. Crawler excavators are the second largest selling product and have the biggest growth potential in the future. The fast-expanding lower segments of the Indian customer pyramid are particularly cost-conscious, constituting 60% of the total units sold.
The total market in number of units in 2010 is expected to be almost 50,000.
With an extensive road network of 3.3 million km, India has the second largest in the world. Its roads carry about 61% of the freight and 85% of the passenger traffic, and all the highways and expressways together constitute about 66,000km (just 2% of all roads), whereas they carry 40% of the road traffic. The annual growth is projected at 12-15% for passenger traffic and 15-18% for cargo traffic.
However, with India accounting for 10% of global road accident deaths (about 125,000 fatalities and at least 500,000 serious injuries each year) the country is losing 3% of its GDP to road crashes every year.
Last year the National Campaign for Reduction of Road Fatalities, a joint initiative of the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways and International Roads Federation (IRF) was launched in New Delhi.
As part of a National Programme a target of reducing road accident deaths by 50% by the year 2012 has been set by the Ministry.
Launching the national campaign Mr Kamal Nath, Minister for Road Transport and Highways, stressed the need to change the outdated Motor Vehicle Act to address the specific concerns of road safety. He said the engineering design of roads should be improved along with the accelerated road building programme to the standards of safe and 'forgiving roads'.
According to sources, to further the existing infrastructure the Indian government annually spends about US$3.7 billion, but the spending on highway construction is much higher, and reports are that total investments in India over the coming years are likely to be between $320-500 billion.
Sources agree that road development is recognised as essential to sustain India's economic growth (GDP is expected to be 6% plus in 2010).
Projects have been attracting huge Direct Foreign Investment (FDI), and during the next two years India will offer a package of road projects worth US$50 billion.
The Road Transport and Highways Ministry hopes that by June 2010, projects worth $20 billion will be awarded to contractors, apart from $12 billion worth of contracts awarded between November 2009 and now.
Large infrastructure projects will be awarded to big companies and not small ones, and the Ministry expects that Malaysian companies will take a large share of these road projects. Currently, there are 35 Malaysian companies involved in road projects in India.
With a new government in place since May 2009, the focus (and expenditure) on infrastructure seems to be improving. Previous spending on infrastructure was a lowly 5% of the total GDP. Now, the objective is to reach 9% by 2015, and the new government is ambitious to increase the construction of roads from 4km/day to 20km/day or 7,000km/year by April.
India's highway development targets over the past few years has been one of the most ambitious in the world and while there remains much to be done, many of the basic aims have been achieved under the initial phases of the National Highways Development Plan (NHDP) through upgrading and the construction of new roads. Work is scheduled through to 2015, although the aim is to eventually upgrade all National Highways.
Indeed, at the Road Design and Construction Asia conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (18-19 May 2010), Nirmal Jit Singh, Director General (Road Development), Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, India, is pencilled in to give an overview of the $70 billion NHDP project. This will include an update on the project's current status, developments within the several key completed phases and addressing the challenges faced.
The NHDP broadly consists of developing 1,000km of expressways; 8,737km of roads, including 3,846km of National Highways in the north-east; four-laning 20,000km of National Highways and 6,736km on North-South and East-West corridors (Srinagar in the north to Kanyakumari in the south, and Silchar in the east to Porbandar in the west); six-laning 6,500km of the Golden Quadrilateral (the route connecting the four major cities of Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata and Chennai) and selected National Highways, and widening 20,000km of National Highways to two lanes.
Indeed, on the basis of route numbers there is over 250 National Highways in India and apart from linking the four major cities they also pass through other major cities and towns including Agra, Ahmedabad, Allahabad, Amritsar, Aurangabad, Bagdogra, Bangalore, Bhavnagar, Bhopal, Bhubaneswar, Chandigarh, Coimbatore, Gorakhpur, Guwahati, Gwalior, Hyderabad, Indore, Jaipur, Jammu, Jamnagar, Jodhpur, Jorhat, Kangra, Kanpur, Kullu, Lucknow, Madurai, Manglore, Nagpur, Patna, Rajkot, Ranchi, Shimla, Thiruvanathapuramm, Tiruchirapalli, Tirupati, Trivandrum, Udaipur, Vadodara, Varanasi, Vijayawada and Vishakhapatnam.
Another interesting plan comes from the Indian Ministry of Shipping, Road Transport and Highways, which is considering a 'green corridor' highway project solely for farmers with 'no toll' charges that would link rural roads with National Highways, and this is likely to be developed along with the six-lane project under the NHDP.
The National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) is the government body responsible for implementing the NHDP and all its contracts whether for construction or BOT (build, operate, transfer) are awarded through competitive bidding However, indications are that private sector participation is increasing, and this is through construction contracts and BOT for some stretches, based on either the lowest annuity or the lowest lump sum payment from the government.
BOT contracts allow tolling on those stretches of the NHDP, and a large component of highways is to be developed through public-private partnerships (PPPs), with several high-traffic stretches already awarded to private companies on a BOT basis. Indeed, late last year, the operation, maintenance and transfer of nine stretches of highways, covering 1,400km, were given by the NHAI to PPP for the first time.
For example, India's Reliance Infrastructure (R-Infra) is planning to launch infrastructure projects worth a total of $2.14 billion in the next seven months, including four road projects. The first of these agreements is due shortly from the Maharashtra State Road Development (MSRDC) for part of the 13.75km Western Freeway Sea Link Road Project, an ambitious project to connect the suburbs of Mumbai with downtown Mumbai. The first phase of the project, the tolled Rajiv Ghandi Setu (Bandra-Worli Sea Link) already links Bandra in the north with Worli to the south with a cable stayed bridge spanning the Mahim Bay. The next stage of the project is the building of a freeway along the city's western seaboard, linking Worli with Nariman Point.