For years, the road between Mudigedu and Sanjamala, tucked into the Nallamala foothills of Nandyal district, told the same story every monsoon. 

Trucks hauling limestone for the region's cement plants and slabs from its granite quarries rolled over it daily, and by the time the rains arrived, the surface would splinter into cracks, ruts, and eventually potholes deep enough to swallow a scooter's wheel. 

This stretch runs through Banaganapalle constituency, an area long troubled by heavy freight traffic. 

On 4 July, 2025, Andhra Pradesh's Roads and Buildings Department inaugurated something the state had never tried before: a pilot project using Danish Asphalt Reinforcing Fibre Technology, an idea imported from Denmark and already at work beneath the runways of Heathrow Airport, on Dubai's motorways, and along Germany's A7 highway.

Potholes are no minor inconvenience in India. 

Government data has placed pothole-linked crashes in the thousands annually, and the Supreme Court once remarked that more Indians die from bad roads than from terrorist attacks, a comparison that has pushed states to seek sturdier alternatives to plain bitumen.

A fibre borrowed from Denmark's toolkit

The technology comes from Danish Fibres A/S, a company that has spent more than 40 years perfecting reinforcement fibres, beginning with a 1985 patent for blast-control fibres and later expanding into concrete and asphalt reinforcement worldwide. 

Its Wiking asphalt fibres combine aramid, the high-tensile material used in bulletproof vests, with polyolefin, forming a web-like structure inside the asphalt mix. 

Mixed into hot bitumen at under a kilogramme per tonne, the fibres........

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