, Inset A: shows the major prehistorical cultural currents, B: pre-
Mauryan routes, C: Mauryan routes, D: routes c. 1st century CE, and E: the Z-shaped region of developed roads. , one of the oldest roads in Asia. Originally built by
Ashoka and rebuilt by
Sher Shah Suri.
Kos Minars (right) were used to mark major routes. The first evidence of road development in the
Indian subcontinent can be traced back to approximately around 2800 BC in the ancient cities of
Harrapa and
Mohenjodaro of the
Indus Valley Civilization. Ruling
emperors and monarchs of
ancient and
medieval India continued to construct roads to connect the cities. The existing
Grand Trunk Road was re-built by the
Mauryan Empire, and further rebuilt by subsequent entities such as the
Sur Empire, the
Mughal Empire and the
British Empire. In the 1830s, the
British East India Company started a programme of
metalled road construction ( gravel road), for both commercial and administrative purposes. The Grand Trunk Road – from Calcutta, through Delhi to Peshawar – was rebuilt at a cost of £1,000 per mile; roads from
Bombay to
Pune, Bombay to
Agra and Bombay to
Madras were constructed; and a Public Works Department and the
Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee were founded, to train and employ local surveyors, engineers and overseers, to perform the work, and to maintain the roads. This programme resulted in an estimated of metalled roads being constructed by the 1850s. In December 1934, the
Indian Roads Congress (IRC) was formed, on the recommendations of the Indian Road Development Committee (
Jayakar Committee) of the
Government of India. In 1943, they proposed a twenty-year plan to increase the road network from to by 1963, to achieve a road density of 16 km per 100 km2 of land. The construction was to be paid in part through the duty imposed, since 1939, on petrol sales. This became known as the Nagpur Plan. The construction target was achieved in the late 1950s. In 1956, a Highways Act was passed, and a second twenty-year plan proposed for the period 1961–1981, with the ambition of doubling road density to 32 km per 100 km2. This second plan became known as the Bombay Road Plan. connects the four major Metropolitan Cities of India, viz.,
Delhi (
north),
Kolkata (
east),
Chennai (
south) and
Mumbai (
west). In 1998,
National Highways Development Project (NHDP) was started by the then Prime Minister
Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The flagship project of the NHDP is the
Golden Quadrilateral, a total of of four-to-six-lane highways connecting the four major cities of
Delhi,
Mumbai,
Chennai and
Kolkata. The total cost of the project is , funded largely by the government's special petroleum product tax revenues and government borrowing. In January 2012, India announced that the four-lane GQ highway network was complete. Another important road project of the NHDP is the four-to-six-lane
North–South and East–West Corridor, comprising national highways connecting four extreme points of the country. The project aims to connect
Srinagar in the north to
Kanyakumari in the south (including a spur from
Salem to Kanyakumari, via
Coimbatore and
Kochi), and
Silchar in the east to
Porbandar in the west. As of 31 October 2016, 90.99% of the project had been completed, 5.47% of the project work is under implementation and 3.52% of the total length is remaining. As of May 2017, under NHDP, about of four-to-six-lane highways have been constructed (including the GQ and N–S/E–W Corridor), while a total of of road has been planned to have four-to-six lanes under the NHDP. The
National Highways and Infrastructure Development Corporation Limited (NHIDCL) is a Public Sector Enterprise(PSE) created by the
Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH), Government of India in the year 2014 to build highways in technical challenging and high altitude regions of the
Northeast India,
Uttarakhand,
Jammu and Kashmir,
Ladakh and the
Andaman & Nicobar Islands. It has the task to implement the Special Accelerated Road Development Programme for North Eastern Region (SARDP-NE) in National Highways portion. The SARDP-NE is under implementation in Phases. • Phase-A: Approved in 2005, it included about 4,099 km length of roads (3,014 km of NH and 1,085 km of State roads). The SARDP-NE Phase ‘A’ is expected to be completed by 2023–24. • Phase-B: It covers 3,723 km (2,210 km NHs and 1,513 km of State roads) of road. Phase ‘B’ of SARDP-NE shall be taken up after completion of Phase ‘A’. started in 2017, with a target of constructing of new highways at an estimated cost of . Bharatmala Phase I plans to construct of highways (including the remaining projects that were under NHDP) by 2021–22, at an estimated cost of . In 2021, Asia's longest high speed track, National Automotive Test Track was inaugurated in
Indore, which would be used to measure the maximum speed capabilities of high-end cars and other categories of vehicles. India's rate of road building has accelerated since 2010s. It averaged about per day in and per day in 2018–19. The country's target is to build of highways per day. On July 21, 2021, the
Minister of Road Transport and Highways Nitin Gadkari said that India has created a world record of constructing of four-lane concrete road in 24 hours and of single lane bitumen road in just 21 hours as per the highest IRC norms and specifications of the MoRTH to ensure quality control. Also, an average of of highways have been constructed every day during 2020–21. As of 2021, 64.5% of all goods in India are moved through the country's road network, 90% of India's total passenger traffic uses the road network to commute and the road network contributes 4.8% to the country's gross domestic product. In 2023, India's road network became the
world's second largest, after the United States. From 2013 to 2014 to 2022 to 2023, the country's road network grew by approximately 59%. ==Types of roads==