Context:

• This year’s budget has been hailed as an infrastructure budget, with its increased expenditure on capital investments in infrastructure rather than on developmental services such as education or on subsidies and support.
• The offered argument is the expected multiplier effect as these investments bear fruit.
• The Ministry of Roads, Transport and Highways has seen a 30 per cent increase in its budget, from Rs 92,000 crore in 2020-21 to Rs 1,18,000 crore this year.

Importance of Roads:

• Roads are certainly very important for both social and economic well-being.
• From the Census data, we see that more than 12 percent of high school students travel more than 5 km to go to school, and about 27 per cent use public transport.
• For college-going students, both these numbers are above 40 per cent. It is also known that road connectivity increases economic activity and expands avenues for employment.

Outcome Framework:

• The budget documents present an Outcome Framework and there, we see that 12,000 km of highways are planned for this year.
• Last year, of the promised 2,500 km of highways, fully 237 km have come onstream. Contracts for the remaining length have been issued.
• Economists and contractors may watch kilometres and crores of rupees, but common people want mobility.
• There is no mention of this term in the Outcome Framework, nor a suitable metric in the research agenda of the ministry.
• In any case, with an allocation of Rs 30 crore last year, or about 0.05 per cent of its outlay, this particular detail must have escaped attention.

Proposal:

• We propose here, two simple indices to measure the state of the road network. These are
  • the Mobility Index (MI), which measures the average speed of the typical journey, and
  • the Excess Distance Index (EDI) which is the ratio of distance travelled to the straight-line distance.
• MI measures the quality of roads and congestion, while the EDI measures the connectivity and density of the road network.
• The advent of web-based map services allows us to estimate these indices at close to zero cost, which otherwise could have taken fully 0.1 per cent of the ministry’s outlay to measure.
• Unit of the Mobility Index (MI) is kilometres/hour (kmph), while the Excess Distance Index (EDI) is simply a ratio, and will always be greater than 1.

https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/union-budget-2021-education-infrasructure-highway-roads-construction-7233349/

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