The Bharatmala Pariyojna (lit. 'India garland project') is an ecosystem of road development which includes development of tunnels, bridges, elevated corridors, flyovers, overpass, interchanges, bypasses, ring roads etc. to provide shortest, jam free & optimized connectivity to multiple places, it is a centrally-sponsored and funded Road and Highways project of the Government of India.[1] Bharatmala is mainly focused on connecting remote areas and satellite cities of megacities such as Bengaluru, Pune, Hyderabad etc. The total investment for 83,677 km (51,994 mi)[2] committed new highways is estimated at ?10.63 lakh crore (US$130 billion), making it the single largest outlay for a government road construction scheme (as of March 2022). The project will build highways from Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Punjab, Haryana and then cover the entire string of Himalayan territories - Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand - and then portions of borders of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar alongside Terai, and move to West Bengal, Sikkim, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, and right up to the Indo-Myanmar border in Manipur and Mizoram.[1] Special emphasis will be given on providing connectivity to far-flung border and rural areas including the tribal and backward areas. Bharatmala Project will interconnect 550 District Headquarters (from current 300) through a minimum 4-lane highway by raising the number of corridors to 50 (from current 6) and move 80% freight traffic (40% currently) to National Highways by interconnecting 24 logistics parks, 66 inter-corridors (IC) of total 8,000 km (5,000 mi), 116 feeder routes (FR) of total 7,500 km (4,700 mi) and 7 north east Multi-Modal waterway ports.
The ambitious umbrella programme will subsume all existing Highway Projects including the flagship National Highways Development Project (NHDP), launched by the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government in 1998.
Other than NHDP related projects which are greenfield, there is Brownfield National Highway Projects which is a upgradation/widening of existing 4 lane highways into 6 lane highways which are not controlled access highways. Many state highways have been converted to National Highways under this project.
It is both enabler and beneficiary of other key Government of India schemes, such as Sagarmala, Dedicated Freight Corridors, Industrial corridors, UDAN-RCS, BharatNet, Digital India, Parvatmala and Make in India.
