NEW DELHI, October 9 — The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA), chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on Friday approved a landmark capital infrastructure package of ₹76,000 crore to construct 5,400 kilometers of high-speed, access-controlled national economic corridors spanning eight major industrial states.
According to execution plans released by the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH), the greenfield and brownfield alignment packages will be implemented through the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) under Hybrid Annuity Mode (HAM) and Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT-Toll) public-private partnership concessions. The projects target critical transit links between emerging manufacturing clusters, dry ports, and coastal shipping hubs.
The Union Government highlighted that the upgraded expressway networks are engineered to compress transit times across major freight corridors by up to 40 percent, advancing the core objectives of the National Logistics Policy (NLP) to compress nationwide logistics costs from current levels of 12-13 percent to single digits (8-9 percent of GDP). Furthermore, project execution is estimated to generate over 35 crore person-days of direct and indirect employment.
Infrastructure economics under PM Gati Shakti National Master Plan, public-private partnership models (EPC, BOT, HAM, and TOT asset monetization), the statutory mandate of NHAI (established under the NHAI Act 1988), and the National Monetisation Pipeline (NMP) are central themes across UPSC Civil Services (GS-III: Infrastructure & Economic Growth). Candidates should analyze how expressway networks drive freight efficiency and balanced regional development.