By Vinod Kumar Giri, Senior Vice-President (Head Operations), DRA Infracon Private Limited.
India built its road network at record speed. The harder – and more valuable – work now is keeping it. A quiet shift in financing and technology is changing how that gets done.
There is a number in Union Budget 2026-27 that says more about the next decade of Indian infrastructure than any construction target does. During the year, the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways has been allocated Rs 3,098.75 billion – an 8 per cent increase over the previous year’s revised estimates, and roughly 6 per cent of total central government expenditure. Of that, Rs 2,941.67 billion is capital expenditure. Ministry capital spending has compounded at about 33 per cent per year since 2012-13, one of the most sustained infrastructure build-outs anywhere in the world. Revenue expenditure over the same period has averaged around Rs 133 billion per year.
That ratio is the story. India has built an enormous asset base very quickly, and the machinery for keeping it has not scaled at anything like the same rate.
The national highway network has grown from 91,287 km in 2014 to roughly 146,560 km – witnessing a 60 per cent expansion in a decade. National highways account for about 2 per cent of India’s total road length of roughly 6,670,000 km, but carry more than 40 per cent of its traffic. A CII-Knight Frank assessment estimates that about $360 billion of infrastructure investment over the decade has pulled logistics costs down to 10-10.7 per cent of GDP from 13-14 per cent, worth $123 billion-$133 billion a year to the economy (estimates vary sharply by methodology; a DPIIT-NCAER study on a different basis puts the figure lower.)
The build worked. The question that defines the next decade is a different one: what does the network cost to keep, and who is accountable for keeping it?
The asymmetry nobody priced
Consider the timeframes an Indian highway asset actually lives under. A major structure is designed for a service life measured in decades. The contractor who builds it typically carries a defect liability of four to five years. The maintenance budget that will sustain it is appropriated annually and competes each year against new construction – an argument maintenance almost always loses, because commissioning a corridor is visible and desilting a drain is not. Every party in the delivery chain has legally and financially exited before the asset enters the phase of life in which deterioration actually shows. Durability ends up as everyone’s stated aspiration and nobody’s contractual deliverable, because it appears in no bill of quantities against which it can be measured, paid for or enforced.
The consequences show in the maintenance data. In 2024-25, the government approved short-term maintenance contracts (STMCs) covering 17,884 km at Rs 28.42 billion, and performance-based maintenance contracts (PBMCs) covering 6,118 km at Rs 67.57 billion. The contrast is instructive. STMCs typically run one to two years; PBMCs run five to seven years and transfer condition risk to the contractor. On a per-kilometre-year basis, the PBMC is the more expensive instrument, and it covers barely a quarter of the length that the cheaper, shorter, more reactive one does.
There is a second asymmetry, less discussed. The private sector’s share of road construction has fallen from 51 per cent in 2014-15 to around 15 per cent in 2023-24. As the state has taken on more of the building, it has also absorbed more of the long-term condition risk, without a corresponding shift in how that risk is funded or measured.
Maintenance became a data problem
The technological shift has moved fast. The National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) has been restructuring highway operations and maintenance around predictive rather than reactive intervention, built on three pillars: large-scale condition monitoring, continuous digital asset records, and risk-based prioritisation.
Network survey vehicles (NSVs) are the backbone. The NHAI has invited bids to deploy NSVs across 23 states covering 20,933 km, using 3D laser-based systems with high-resolution 360-degree cameras, differential GPS, inertial measurement units and distance measuring indicators. These capture surface cracking, potholes, patches, rutting and roughness automatically, without human interpretation.
Critically, the NSV survey has been made mandatory at project completion certification and every six months thereafter, and written into standard bidding documents for consultancy services. That makes a durability baseline – the single most underused instrument in Indian asset management – contractual.
Artificial intelligence (AI) dashcams extend coverage cheaply. Cameras mounted on route patrol vehicles are being rolled out across roughly 40,000 km of network, running weekly surveys organised across five zones, and picking up road furniture defects such as faded markings, damaged crash barriers, non-functional streetlights, alongside pavement condition. The platform supports side-by-side comparison of the same stretch over time.
Drone analytics are building digital inventories, monitoring structures and identifying encroachment on highway land. Falling weight deflectometer testing measures structural response beneath the surface, catching problems invisible to any camera.
All of it feeds the NHAI data lake, where a road asset management cell converts condition data into maintenance prioritisation. Field reporting has moved onto the NHAI One and Tatpar apps, with geo-tagged, time-stamped photographs and digital test uploads.
Alongside this, NHAI has introduced a concessionaire rating system – assessed every six months and published – and tightened request for proposal provisions with stricter qualification norms, a narrower definition of comparable work, and a ban on unauthorised subcontracting beyond permitted limits, now treated as an undesirable practice attracting penalty.
Taken together, this is the infrastructure of accountability the sector has lacked: data that is continuous rather than episodic, comparable over time, and attached to a named party.
The engineering that decides the outcome
Technology tells you what is failing. It does not tell you why, and that answer is unglamorous and largely unchanged – water.
In pavements, water displaces bitumen from aggregate at the interface, causing stripping and ravelling. Trapped beneath the bound layers under wheel load, it is pressurised and ejected through cracks, carrying fines with it – the process that turns a hairline crack into a pothole, forming the void first and collapsing the surface later. Saturation reduces effective subgrade bearing capacity, so the pavement loses the foundation it was designed against.
In structures, the mechanism is chemical and less forgiving. Steel in sound concrete is protected by high pore-solution alkalinity. Carbonation and chloride ingress destroy that protection, and both are transport processes, governed entirely by how easily their agents move through the cover concrete. Once corrosion starts, it is self-accelerating: corrosion products occupy several times the volume of the steel they replace, cracking the cover, admitting more water and accelerating the reaction.
Strength is what we test. Permeability is what determines how long the asset lasts.
This points to an uncomfortable proposition for anyone writing specifications. We accept structural concrete principally on a compressive strength test. No Indian bridge has deteriorated because its concrete was insufficiently strong. Structures deteriorate because their concrete was sufficiently permeable to let chloride, moisture and carbon dioxide reach the reinforcement inside the intended service life.
The market has partly anticipated this. India’s construction chemicals sector is estimated at around $2.3 billion-$2.6 billion, with waterproofing solutions accounting for roughly 35-38 per cent of it and growing at about 7 per cent annually. Membranes are displacing traditional finishes on infrastructure work, driven by monsoon exposure and by tighter BIS standards – IS 2645 for waterproofing compounds and IS 9103 for admixtures.
But the technology is rarely the constraint. Waterproofing is a system – substrate preparation, primer, membrane, protection layer and detailing – and installed systems almost never fail in the middle of the sheet. They fail at terminations, upstands, penetrations, drainage outlets and expansion joints. The battle is over detailing, application quality and verification, not over which membrane was purchased.
The corresponding investment is small. Deck waterproofing and concrete protection typically represent a low single-digit percentage of structure capital cost, and they defend the whole asset. The classical durability-economics relationship – de Sitter’s Law of Fives – holds that the same outcome costs 1 unit at design, five during construction, twenty-five as early preventive maintenance, and one hundred and twenty-five once deterioration has reached the reinforcement.
Three gaps that remain open
- Verification is still the weak link. Cover meter surveys, adhesion pull-off tests, holiday testing of membranes and permeability testing of concrete are quick, established and cheap relative to what they protect. Each tests something about to become permanently inaccessible. They belong at contractual hold points, not on a best-practice list.
- Structures lag pavements. The Indian Bridge Management System inventorised 172,517 structures on national highways – 134,229 culverts, 32,806 minor bridges, 3,647 major and 1,835 extra-long. Pavement condition monitoring has since raced ahead on the back of NSVs and dashcams. Structural health monitoring has not moved at the same pace, even though bridge deterioration is slower to appear, far more expensive to reverse, and carries safety consequences that pavement roughness does not.
- Climate has outrun the design basis. Rainfall intensity-duration-frequency relationships embedded in older detailed project reports (DPRs) no longer represent observed events in many basins. Cross-drainage works sized against historical data are hydraulically undersized against present conditions and will become more so. Drainage designed for yesterday’s climate is a durability liability today – and drainage remains, in most DPRs, the last chapter, prepared by the most junior team and value-engineered first when the estimate exceeds its ceiling.
What the next tender could do
None of the following requires new technology, new codes or new money. They require new clauses
- State a target service life in the contract, with a verification method, not as a line in the design basis report that is never referred to again.
- Add durability parameters to concrete acceptance criteria alongside compressive strength – water-binder ratio, supplementary cementitious material content, cover verification and permeability limits derived from exposure class.
- Make waterproofing and concrete protection separately measured pay items. Anything deemed included is, in practice, deemed optional. An item with its own rate, measurement and inspection survives value engineering; one buried inside a composite wearing-coat rate does not.
- Require a whole-life cost statement from every bidder, even before it carries evaluation weight. Whole-life evaluation is genuinely hard in India because the deterioration and cost data do not yet exist at scale. But the discipline of preparing the statement is what starts generating that data – and the data lake is, for the first time, somewhere it could live.
- Mandate a baseline condition survey and digital asset record at handover. With NSV surveys now required for completion certification, the instrument already exists. What is needed is for it to become evidence: when deterioration appears in year seven, the difference between a construction defect and normal ageing should be settled by data rather than by negotiation.
In sum
India spent a decade proving it could build at scale. The evidence of the past three years is that the country is now assembling – through capital markets and sensors rather than through circulars – the machinery to keep what it built.
The remaining gap is contractual. The engineering is largely settled, and the monitoring is arriving fast. What has not caught up is the set of clauses that would make service life something a named party is measured against, paid for, and held to.
That is a smaller problem than the one India has already solved. It is also the one standing between a network that was built well and a network that lasts.