The
National Highways Act, 1956 provided for public i.e. state investment in the building and maintenance of the highways. The
National Highways Authority of India was established by the
National Highways Authority of India Act, 1988. Section 16(1) of the Act states that the function of NHAI is to develop, maintain, and manage the National Highways and any other highways vested in, or entrusted to, it by the Government of India. In 1998 India launched a massive program of highway upgrades, called the
National Highways Development Project (NHDP), in which the main north–south and east–west corridors and highways connecting the four metropolitan cities (
Delhi,
Mumbai,
Chennai and
Kolkata) have been fully paved and widened into four-lane highways. Some of the busier National Highway sectors in India were also converted to four- or six-lane limited-access highways. The
National Highways and Infrastructure Development Corporation Limited started functioning as of 18 July 2014. It is a fully owned company of the
Government of India, under the administrative control of the
Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, and was created to develop, maintain and manage the national highways, strategic roads and other infrastructure of India. It was dedicated to the task of promoting regional connectivity in parts of the country which share international boundaries. It is responsible for the development, maintenance and management of National Highways in hilly terrain of North-East part of India, Andaman & Nicobar Islands, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir, Ladakh and Uttarakhand. It works as a specialised agency in high altitude areas and border areas. Apart from highways, NHIDCL is constructing logictic hubs and transport related infrastructure e.g.
multimodal transport hubs such as bus ports, container depots, automated multilevel car parking etc. The
Ministry of Road Transport and Highways adopted a new systematic numbering of National Highways in April 2010. It is a systematic numbering scheme based on the orientation and the geographic location of the highway. The new system indicates the direction of National Highways whether they are east–west (odd numbers) or north–south (even numbers). It also indicates the geographical region where they are with even numbers increasing from east to west starting from NH2 and odd numbers increasing from north to south starting from NH1.
Bharatmala, a centrally-sponsored and funded road and highways project of the
Government of India with a target of constructing of new highways, was started in 2018. Phase I of the Bharatmala project involves the construction of 34,800 km of highways (including the remaining projects under NHDP) at an estimated cost of by 2021–22. ==List of national highways in India==