Maharashtra’s national highways rise above Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh
Maharashtra is ahead of its neighbouring states Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh when it comes to the number of national highway projects sanctioned in the state. In the financial year 2014-15, 20 such projects were sanctioned in Maharashtra, compared to six in Madhya Pradesh and 12 in Gujarat.
According to the data compiled from the Union ministry of road transport and highways, in the financial year 2013-14, 16 national highway projects were sanctioned in Maharashtra, and an equal number of projects were sanctioned for national highways in Madhya Pradesh. However, in Gujarat 12 projects were sanctioned for the financial year 2013-14.
The data further revealed that in the financial year 2012-13, in Maharashtra 24 national highway projects were sanctioned followed by 22 approved projects in Gujarat and 14 in Madhya Pradesh.
Experts claimed that the reason behind Maharashtra’s progress in terms of these national highway projects could be because it is a highly urbanised state which has many urban or semi-urban cities such as Mumbai, Navi Mumbai, Pune, Nashik, Nagpur, Aurangabad and Kolhapur.
According to transport expert, Jitendra Gupta, as Mumbai is the financial capital of the country, it is obvious that the state would derive some benefit from it. Also, industrialists prefer Maharashtra and Gujarat to Madhya Pradesh and that could be the reason why even though Madhya Pradesh is a bigger state, both Maharashtra and Gujarat have more national highway projects sanctioned by the Centre.
However, the data has shown that north-eastern states have not been paid much attention as not even a single project of national highways was sanctioned in Arunachal Pradesh in the past two years. It was during the financial year 2012-13 that the last project took off in Arunachal Pradesh.
In Nagaland, only one project was sanctioned in the financial year 2014-15 followed by four in Mizoram and three in Meghalaya.
Meanwhile, Uttrakhand and Karnataka are the top gainers in this category. In the financial year 2014-15, 52 projects were sanctioned in Uttarakhand followed by 48 in Karnataka.
Commenting on the distribution of such projects, transport expert A.V. Shenoy said, “We can only guess that because one wants to industrialise a state its infrastructure gets the preference. However, one also needs to look into what parameters were considered while sanctioning these highways. Also, one needs to consider the length of these highways in terms of kilometres and not just their numbers.”
Meanwhile, state public works minister, Chandrakant Patil had announced last month that 3,839km of state highways has been included in the national highway project, and that includes Mumbai-Vadodara six-lane highway along with Satara-Kagal highway and Mumbai-Goa highway.
