Roads are the lifeline of any country and India has been fortunate to have been blessed with a robust infrastructure of roads and highways that form the economic backbone of the country, facilitating economic growth, expansion of townships and development along their routes. India has more than 3 million kilometres of road network, making it one of the largest in the world. The country today has one of the most widespread networks of transport system with small 'pagdan-dis1, ring roads, flyovers, highways, expressways and freeways joining the length and breadth of the country. The roadways travel has developed into an infrastructure,strength that has given the Indian economy the necessary backbone support. National Highways are the primary long-distance roadways in India. They are maintained by the Central Government, and the majority are two-lane (one in each direction). They span about 67,000 km, of which about 200 km are expressways. Though Indian highways constitute approximately 2% of the total road network of India, but they carry nearly 40% of the total traffic. On the hand, the roads carry about 65 percent of freight and 86.7 per cent of passenger traffic. With the number of vehicles growing at an average rate of nearly ten per cent per annum ,rapid expansion and strengthening of the road network has now become a necessity to provide for both present and future traffic and for improved accessibility to the hintherland. The government and the concerned authorities are more focussed than ever before to further develop and strengthen the road network which has now become imperative in the view of rapid economic growth and industrialisation. The National Highways Bill, passed in 1995, provides for private investment in the building and maintenance of the highways. And the National Highways Development Project, currently being implemented, seeks to massively expand India's highway network. The National Highway Development Project The Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises, a branch of the Government of India, is the apex body for formulation and administration of the rules and regulations and laws relating to Road Transport, National Highways and Transport Research with a view to increasing the mobility and efficiency of the road transport system in India. And the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI); constituted by an act of Parliament -the National Highways Authority of India Act, 1988; it is responsible for trie development, maintenance and management of National Highways entrusted to it and for matters connected or incidental thereto. The Authority was operationalized in February, 1995. It was -under former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee that India launched a massive program of highway upgrades, called the National Highway Development Project (NHDP), in which the main north-south and east-west connecting corridors and highways connecting the four metropolitan cities have been fully paved and widened into 4-lane highways. The National Highways Development Project is a project to upgrade, rehabilitate and widen major highways in India to a higher standard. The project was started in 1998. This project is managed by the NHAI under the Ministry of Road, Transport and Highways. The NHAI has been mandated to implement the Rs. 54,000 Crores (US$ 13.2 billion) on NHDR which includes the Golden Quadrilateral (GQ) and the NS-EW Corridor (NSEW) corridors. The progress of this project can be tracked from their official website, which updates map on regular basis. As of 2006, the NHAI has implemented US$ 71 billion on this project. Under NHDR some of the Busy National Highway sectors in India have been converted to 4 or 6 lane expressways, for example, Delhi-Agra, Delhi-Jaipur, Ahmedabad-Vadodara, Mumbai-Pune, Mumbai-Surat, Bangalore-Mysore, Bangalore-Chennai, Chennai-Tada, Hyderabad-Vijayawada and Guntur-Vijayawada. The Phase V of the National Highway Development Project is to convert all 6000 km of the Golden Quadrilateral Highways to 6-lane highways/expressways by 2012. Traditionally, these road projects were fully financed and controlled/ supervised by the Government. And the implementation of road projects was purely dependent on the availability/allocation of funds out of the budget of the Government. It was assessed, at the time of the preparation of the Tenth Plan that for National Highways alone, Rs. 1,65,000 crore is required for removal of the deficiencies. It is in this context that alternative innovative means of financing have gained importance for providing an adequate and sustained support for financing the road projects. With a view to attract private investment in road development, maintenance and operation, National Highways Act (NH Act) 1956 was amended in June 1995. To encourage participation of private sector, the Department of Road Transport and Highways has laid down comprehensive policy guidelines for private sector participation in the Highway sector. The Government has also announced several incentives such as tax exemptions and duty free import of road building equipments and machinery to encourage private sector participation in the highway sector. It has been decided that all the sub-projects in NHDP Phase-Ill to Phase VII would be would be taken up on the basis of Public Private Partnership (PPP) on Build, Operate and Transfer (BOT) mode or Annuity mode. The private sector participation envisaged in Phase II of NHDP has also been increased. Besides, to improve the position of availability of funds, cess on petrol and diesel has been levied to make funds available for highway infrastructure development. Funds have also obtained from externally funding agencies like the World Bank, Asian development Bank etc. for projects in the highway sector. In future, India also has ambitions to experiment with rubber roads but the project is a distant dream as of now. Indian roads have undoubtedly gone through a revolution in the last 10 years. Continuous expansion, maintenance and improvement have been a part of this revolution. Efforts are now being made to improve the existing highways and road network by improving low grade sections and widening to 4-lanes, strengthening and rehabilitating existing assets by constructing new roads and bridges over missing links to meet the demands of a rapidly growing Indian economy.