Highway Construction Data: Kilometres Built Per Year Under Modi

Highway construction pace, often cited in terms of kilometres built per day, is one of the most frequently repeated infrastructure statistics in Indian political discourse. This article lays out the actual year-by-year data along with important context about how the numbers have been measured and debated.

The Overall Network Growth

India’s national highway network measured roughly 91,287 kilometres in 2014, according to government data reported by The Tribune, growing to about 146,342 kilometres by FY25, according to figures from written parliamentary replies by Road Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari, reported by Swarajya Mag, a gain of roughly 55,000 kilometres over the decade, a growth the Road Secretary has separately described, according to Deccan Herald’s coverage, as roughly 60 percent over ten years, making India’s highway network the world’s second-largest.

The Year-by-Year Construction Pace

According to figures reported by ThePrint drawing on National Highways Authority of India data, the daily construction pace moved from 4.1 kilometres per day in 2014-15, up to 9 kilometres per day by 2018-19, before reaching a widely cited peak of 37 kilometres per day in 2020-21, described by the government as its highest-ever figure, according to Business Standard’s coverage of Gadkari’s own statements. More recent years show a different trend: 34 kilometres per day in FY24, then a slowdown to 29 kilometres per day in FY25, a decline Gadkari himself confirmed to Parliament, according to Business Standard’s July 2025 report specifically headlined around the construction pace slowing.

Why the “37 km/day” Figure Needs Context

The often-repeated claim that construction pace grew 200 percent, from 12 kilometres per day in 2013 to 37 in 2021, was specifically fact-checked and found misleading by The Quint’s WebQoof team, which found the real increase over the full eight-year period being compared was closer to 141 percent, since the 200 percent figure compared a single peak year against a low baseline year rather than a fair multi-year average.

The Metric-Change Complication

A separate and less widely known complication, reported by The Wire, is that India switched its highway-counting methodology in 2018 from measuring plain kilometres to measuring lane-kilometres, where a six-lane highway counts six times over compared to the same physical single-lane-equivalent distance. Congress spokesperson Gurdeep Singh Sappal argued, in comments reported by The Wire, that on a consistent lane-kilometre basis, the UPA government’s own construction pace of roughly 30 lane-kilometres per day was closer to the NDA’s later touted 38 lane-kilometre figure than the headline comparison suggests, meaning at least part of the apparent leap in construction speed reflects a change in how the distance is counted rather than construction genuinely accelerating by the full margin often cited.

Major Programmes Behind the Numbers

Much of this construction has been organised under the Bharatmala Pariyojana, a major national highway development programme, under which 26,425 kilometres have been awarded and 20,770 kilometres constructed so far, according to figures Gadkari presented in Parliament, reported by Swarajya. Expressway construction specifically has grown from just 93 kilometres in 2014 to roughly 5,110 kilometres today, with major projects including the Delhi-Mumbai Expressway and the Purvanchal Expressway in Uttar Pradesh largely operational.

The Debt Behind the Construction

This construction pace has come with a significant rise in borrowing. The National Highways Authority of India’s market borrowings rose roughly 1,800 percent, from Rs 3,343 crore in 2014-15 to Rs 61,217 crore in 2018-19, according to ThePrint’s reporting, with debt-servicing costs projected to nearly quadruple over the same period. Business Standard reported in 2019 that the Prime Minister’s Office itself had raised concerns internally about NHAI’s debt-servicing position, and later reporting put the authority’s total debt at over Rs 3.38 trillion by 2021.

How the Government Says It’s Managing the Debt

The government’s own response to the rising debt load has largely centred on monetising existing highway assets rather than relying solely on fresh borrowing, through mechanisms including the Toll-Operate-Transfer model, where the right to collect tolls on already-built stretches is auctioned to private operators in exchange for an upfront payment, and Infrastructure Investment Trusts that let the authority raise funds against future toll revenue. NHAI has periodically reported raising thousands of crores through these routes, according to statements reported by financial outlets, presented as a way of recycling capital from completed roads into new construction without a one-to-one increase in fresh debt for every new kilometre built.

What Independent Fact-Checkers Generally Conclude

Taking the fact-checks and metric-change reporting together, the broader picture that emerges from outlets including The Quint, The Wire, and FactChecker.in is not that highway construction hasn’t genuinely accelerated since 2014, since the underlying data does show real growth in network length and annual construction totals, but rather that some of the specific comparative figures used to describe that acceleration, particularly the most dramatic “12 km/day to 37 km/day” framing, have been presented in ways that overstate the true scale of the speed-up once a consistent measurement basis and a fair multi-year comparison are applied.

Bottom Line

India’s national highway network has grown by roughly 55,000 kilometres since 2014, with the daily construction pace peaking at a government-cited 37 kilometres per day in 2020-21 before slowing to 29 kilometres per day by FY25, a genuine expansion that independent fact-checks have found somewhat overstated in its most-cited comparative claims, and one financed substantially through rising debt that has drawn its own separate scrutiny.

FAQ

Abhyudaya Verma