The road ahead

INDIA: For the past two decades, much of India’s economic growth has come from providing services to the information technology industry. According to the country’s new transport minister, India's next business success story will be not the IT superhighway, but real roads.

Road-building in India has not kept pace with the increase in traffic, and many of the existing streets urgently need repair. Foreign firms often say that the poor infrastructure is the main problem they face when doing business in India. Experts say the lack of a good transportation network is holding back economic growth by as much as two per cent a year.

Kamal Nath, India’s new minister for road, transport and highways, has announced bold plans to attract foreign investment in road-building projects. He is making big changes in public-private partnership agreements so that investors can hold a larger interest in a project.

Nath, who has headed the transport ministry since May, says most of the new highways will be toll roads, which should increase their profitability. He is travelling in Asia, Europe and the US to convince foreign investors to consider India’s infrastructure sector.

India's new transport minister wants to see 20 kilometres of roads built per day.

Currenty, India builds about two kilometres of roads a day. Nath wants to increase this tenfold to 20 kilometres per day, or 7,000 per year. “We have to catch up from the past," Nath told the Indian news channel NDTV. "The story of development is the story of roads.”