The Union Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) is planning to spend around Rs 60,000 crore on land acquisition this year for various highway projects in the pipeline.

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For any infrastructure project -- be it roads, railways, logistics park, recreation zones, special economic zones, industrial parks -- land acquisition is the biggest challenge. Several road or highway projects are stuck or delayed due to land acquisition related issues, which has been among the top reasons for the delay in completing such projects.

"As you are aware that since 2014, when the land acquisition law came into force, prices of land shot up substantially. This year itself we are spending Rs 60,000 crore on land acquisition," said Nitin Gadkari.

On the reasons for land acquisition and the cost involved, he said a lot of road infrastructure work is being undertaken covering mega cities and regions, too.

"In the road sector, earlier there was national highway length of 96,000 km out of the total around 52,00,000 km road network in India. Thus, there was just 2% of national highways in the country. On this 2%, there was 40% of country's traffic. I don't understand why weren't national highways increased before."

Among the first few decisions the NDA government took was to increase the total national highways from 96,000 km to 200,000 km, with this move country's 80% traffic will move on the national highways, he said.

The Union government has already notified 170,000 km of roads into national highways.

As per initial decisions by the government, if there are 10,000 Passenger Car Units (PCUs) such roads will be converted into four-lane highways, while those having 20,000 PCUs will be widened to six lanes. PCUs is a calculation used by transportation and infrastructure sector to assess traffic flow rate on a highway.

Additionally, around Rs 44,000 crore is planned to be spent for 11 access controlled Expressway. Some of them would come up at Eastern Delhi, Mumbai-Vadodara, Delhi-Jaipur, Bangalore-Chennai, Bangalore-Hyderabad. Plans are also afoot to connect Vijayawada and Amravati in Andhra Pradesh with Chennai and Bangalore.

There are plans to make 36 ring roads at various cities of India.

"In road sector, we may adopt various new land acquisition models that have come up recently in the ring roads we will be executing. For example, there's Navi Mumbai International Airport model, Amravati model of Andhra Pradesh, Jaipur Ring Road model, there are a few models in Punjab too," said Gadkari.

Along these ring roads, there will also be logistics park and transport hub. Truck terminals will be connected adjacent to it with godowns, cold storages with rooftop solar to power the facilities.

However, for in the days to come, there definitely will be increase in highway network. But government's first priority is water transport or coastal ways, followed by railways and road.