A silver lining has emerged amid the pandemic as the toll collection across many Indian highways has seen a quick rebound, with traffic on some stretches at 90 per cent of pre-Covid levels.
"Traffic has returned for a number of stretches, including our own portfolio. It is now 90 per cent or more of pre-Covid levels," said a top executive from a fund which owns a road asset portfolio.
As overall toll collection has improved, the government is now banking an improvement in the sector through private participation. Union highway minister Nitin Gadkari on Tuesday said as many as 80 per cent of the projects can be done on PPP (public-private-partnership) mode. Currently, half of the national highway projects awarded by Gadkari's ministry are on PPP basis.
IRB Infrastructure Developers has seen toll collection numbers return to close to 70-75 per cent of pre-Covid levels. "This is a surprising recovery, because a lot of things still continue to be under lockdown and inter-district and intra district is still not very speedy," said Virendra Mhaiskar, chairman and managing director for the company.
Reliance Infrastructure in its annual general meeting statement today also said the company's road toll collection is already at 75 per cent of the pre-Covid levels and will be fully back to pre-Covid levels in the next few weeks.
Company executives add most of the recovery is led by commercial vehicular movement.
In May, traffic on some of these highways stretching was limping back to recovery at 30 per cent to 50 per cent of the usual traffic seen before the Covid-19 hit.
Gadkari said the industry should look at public private partnerships and adopt an integrated approach for developing new models of transportation.
“There is a need to decongest metro cities and urged the industry to create industrial clusters and smart cities. He added that to decrease migration of rural population to urban areas, there is a need to concentrate on upliftment of agriculture sector, tribal and village population.”
The other reason for relying more on private participation, he pointed out is the current financial situation of the government. The minister said that neither state governments nor the central government can afford to pump in huge money at this point.
He added the government will play the role of a facilitator and support the private sector in its initiatives for developing sustainable transportation system.
Industry should consider various aspects of sustainable transportation system which is comprised of low carbon fuels, electric vehicles, water transportation, conversion of diesel vehicles to LNG and CNG, use of ethanol, methanol and hydrogen fuels for vehicles. Industry should then reach out to concerned state governments and ministries and suggest changes in the policies for developing implementable and economically viable projects, the minister said at a Ficci webinar.