Access to expressways in 50-100 km range to be reality in India: official

People will have access to expressways in the range of 50 km to 100 km from any part of the country, said a senior official. Addressing 20th Indo-US Economic Summit, Advisor to Prime Minister, Tarun Kapoor stated that "our aim is to have connectivity in the range of 50 km to 100 km with some expressways."

However he did not give any timeline for creating such a big network of expressways in the country.

Expressways provide seamless access controlled connectivity with very high speed limits of over 100 km/h for vehicles.


About providing expressway connectivity across the country, Kapoor said that it is difficult but we would be going to move towards that.

He pointed out that "we have been largely dependent on road transport (for cargo movement)".

Presently, 25 per cent of cargo movement is done through railways, he stated.

He said that efforts of the government to have better roads like expressways where accidents come down and speed goes up.

He also informed that the country has a road network in the range of 85,000 km to 90,000km.

He suggested that there is need to rework the rural road network to provide connectivity for agriculture producing area for easy transport of produce like tomato and apple in harvest season.

Besides he also suggested that "we have to link (industrial) production areas to ports."

He also stressed the need for use of waterways for cargo movement.

He opined that cargo movement via inland waterways is very less at present for huge country like India.