Transport & Communication — Land Transport: Roads, Highways & Indian Railways

NCERT India: People and Economy — Unit IV, Chapter 7 (Part 1)

Why Do We Need Transport & Communication?

Look around your home. The toothpaste on your brush, the milk in your morning tea, the bread on the breakfast table, the soap in the bathroom and the school books in your bag — none of them were produced inside your house. They were grown in distant fields, manufactured in faraway factories or printed in some other city. Yet they reach you every single day. The bridge that connects the site of production with the place of consumption is what we call transport.

But human beings move much more than fruits, vegetables and clothes. We also move ideas, news, views and messages — and the system that carries these intangible goods from one mind to another is called communication^?. Together, transport and communication form the nervous system of an economy: without them, production would have no market and society would have no shared conversation.

The Major Means of Transportation

From ancient pathways and unmetalled tracks to today’s six-lane expressways, the means of transport have evolved with the economy. The schematic below shows how modern transport divides into three big families.

7.1 Land Transport in India

Pathways and unmetalled roads have been used in the subcontinent since the time of the Indus Valley civilisation. Once economic activity grew and technology improved, metalled roads and railways were built to move large volumes of goods and people. Special-purpose carriers like ropeways, cableways and pipelines were added to handle goods under particular conditions — iron ore over mountains, crude oil under the sea bed, gas across deserts.

Road Transport

India has the second largest road network in the world, with a total length of about 62.16 lakh km (Annual Report 2020-21, Ministry of Road Transport & Highways). Roads carry the bulk of the country’s movement: about 85 per cent of all passenger traffic and 70 per cent of all freight traffic move on roads each year. They are particularly suited to shorter-distance travel and to door-to-door delivery, which neither railways nor airlines can offer.

A Short History of Road Planning in India

Road transport in the modern sense was very limited in India until World War-II. The first serious effort was the Nagpur Plan of 1943, which could not be implemented because of poor coordination between British India and the princely states. After Independence the government drew up the Twenty-Year Road Plan (1961) to systematically improve the conditions of roads in the country — though even after that, roads remained concentrated in and around urban centres while rural and remote areas continued to suffer poor connectivity.

For the purpose of construction and maintenance, Indian roads are classified into four categories. This classification matters because it tells us who owns and maintains a particular road — the Centre, the State or the local body.

Categories of Roads

National Highways — The Backbone of the Network

The National Highways^? are the main arteries that the Central Government builds and looks after. They are designed for inter-state movement, and they connect state capitals, big cities, important ports and railway junctions to one another. The total length of NHs has grown dramatically — from just 19,700 km in 1951 to 1,36,440 km in 2020 — almost a seven-fold expansion. Although NHs make up only about 2 per cent of the total road length of the country, they carry 40 per cent of all road traffic. This staggering load-to-length ratio is what makes the NH grid so strategically important.

Source: Ministry of Road Transport & Highways, Annual Report 2020-21 (morth.nic.in).

National Highways Authority of India (NHAI)

To handle the growing complexity of building and maintaining a continental highway network, the Government of India set up the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI)^? in 1988 and made it operational in 1995. NHAI is an autonomous body under the Ministry of Road Transport & Highways. Its three core responsibilities are development, maintenance and operation of National Highways — and it is the apex authority for raising the quality of any road that has been declared an NH.

National Highway Development Projects

NHAI has executed several flagship corridor projects in different phases. The two earliest and most famous are described below.

Bharatmala Pariyojana — The Next Wave

Launched in 2017, the Bharatmala Pariyojana^? is the most ambitious roads programme since the GQ. The official Press Information Bureau release (2021) describes it as the ‘road’ to the country’s infrastructure development. Its core features are:

• Development of about 26,000 km of Economic Corridors, which along with the Golden Quadrilateral and the North-South–East-West Corridors are expected to carry the majority of freight traffic on roads.
• Focus on ring roads, bypasses and elevated corridors to decongest traffic passing through cities — freeing up urban arteries for local transport.
• Boost to logistic efficiency and connectivity to backward areas, religious-tourism circuits and international borders.

Border Roads & International Highways

Other roads include Border Roads and International Highways. The Border Roads Organisation (BRO)^? was set up in May 1960 to accelerate economic development and to strengthen defence preparedness in strategically sensitive border zones. BRO has built roads in extreme high-altitude terrain — the Manali–Leh road, for instance, runs at an average altitude of 4,270 metres above mean sea level. BRO also undertakes snow clearance in the Himalayan winter, keeping the only line of supply open for both troops and tourists.

International Highways are designed to promote harmonious relationships with India’s neighbours by providing effective road links — the Delhi–Lahore bus that crosses the Wagah border and the Aman Setu between Baramula and Muzaffarabad are well-known symbols of this idea.

Rail Transport — The Steel Lifeline

The Indian Railways is one of the longest networks in the world. It moves both passengers and freight, contributes to economic growth, and (in Mahatma Gandhi’s words) “brought people of diverse cultures together to contribute to India’s freedom struggle.” A single train ticket from Howrah to Mumbai or from Delhi to Chennai effectively threads the country together — states, languages, climates and economies.

The total length of the Indian Railways network was 67,956 km (Railway Year Book 2019-20). The very large size of the system makes a single, centralised management impractical — so for administrative convenience, Indian Railways is divided into 17 zones. Each zone is headed by a General Manager and looks after operations within its territory.

The 17 Railway Zones

The Three Gauges — Project Unigauge

Until very recently, Indian Railways ran on three different track widths or gauges — an inheritance of the British era when different companies adopted different standards.

Project Unigauge^? is the long-running programme launched by Indian Railways to convert the metre and narrow gauge lines to Broad Gauge. At the same time, steam engines have been replaced by diesel and electric locomotives — this has increased both the speed of trains and the haulage capacity of each train. The replacement of coal-burning steam engines has also visibly improved the air quality of stations and the surrounding cities.

Metro Rail — Revolution in Urban Transport

Metro rail systems have revolutionised urban transport in India. Replacing diesel buses with CNG vehicles and adding underground or elevated metros has been a welcome step in controlling air pollution in big cities. Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Kochi, Lucknow, Jaipur and Ahmedabad now run metro services, with new lines under construction in Pune, Nagpur, Bhopal, Patna and Indore.

Konkan Railway — An Engineering Marvel

Areas around towns, raw-material producing regions, plantations, hill stations and cantonment towns were all well connected by railways from the British colonial era — which means the early network was shaped largely by the colonial logic of resource exploitation. After Independence, the routes have been gradually extended into other areas. Today, however, the railway network remains relatively thin in the hill states, the North-East, the central tribal belt and arid Rajasthan.

Modern Rail — Vande Bharat & Dedicated Freight Corridors

Two recent initiatives mark a generational change in the Indian Railways:

• Vande Bharat Express — the country’s indigenously designed semi-high-speed train, running since 2019. Currently operating on more than 30 routes, with top speeds upto 160 km/h.
• Dedicated Freight Corridors (DFCs) — separate twin-track lines being built exclusively for goods trains so that passenger services do not get delayed. Two corridors — Eastern (Ludhiana to Sonnagar) and Western (Dadri to JNPT) — are progressively being commissioned.
• Mumbai–Ahmedabad High-Speed Rail (Bullet Train) — under construction with Japanese cooperation, India’s first true high-speed line.