Opinion: How Modi's Expressway Revolution Is Quietly Rewiring The Indian Economy

The Delhi-Dehradun Expressway, which opened today, is one of dozens of corridors now under construction or in planning

When Prime Minister Narendra Modi stepped into Dehradun on Tuesday to inaugurate the Delhi-Dehradun Expressway, he was opening more than a road. The 210-kilometre, six-lane corridor cuts the drive from the capital to Uttarakhand’s state seat from over six grinding hours to something closer to a morning’s commute, two and a half hours on a good run.

At roughly Rs 12,000-13,000 crore, the project passes through Rajaji National Park on a 12-kilometre elevated deck, only the second such wildlife-protection corridor on an Indian national highway.

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The government calls it an economic corridor rather than a highway.

The Build-Out And the Dividend

The numbers behind India’s decade-long road push are striking when taken together. When Modi took office, the country had about 91,000 kilometres of national highways. That network now exceeds 146,000 kilometres, which is roughly a 60 per cent increase in 10 years. Where high-speed corridors barely registered at 93 kilometres in 2014, they now stretch to 2,474 kilometres.

A decade ago, construction teams were laying about twelve kilometres of highway a day. By 2023-24, they were doing between 28 and 30. The National Highways Authority of India committed Rs 2.07 lakh crore to construction in that single year, a record outlay that eclipsed every previous round of spending.

The new Delhi-Dehradun corridor now locks into the Delhi–Mumbai Expressway and the Eastern Peripheral Expressway, pulling western Uttar Pradesh and the hill state of Uttarakhand into a widening lattice of access‑controlled roads that runs from the Himalayas to the Arabian Sea.

Behind this concrete and asphalt sits a blunt economic logic. For years, India’s logistics bill........

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