Which are the primary Highway grids in India? Explain how National Highways are numbered in India?
The primary highway grids in India are:
The North-South Corridor stretches from Srinagar in J&K state to Kanyakumari – the southernmost tip of India. The length of this major road is 4000kms.
The East-West Corridor connects Porbandar in Gujarat with Silchar in Assam and the total length of this road being 3300kms. (Wonder why they didn’t plan it till the boarder including Arunachal Pradesh!)
The Golden Quadrilateral (GQ) is the highway network connecting the four metros in India – i.e. Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata. The spin-offs of GQ also connect cities like Bangalore, Pune and Ahmedabad. The total length of GQ is 5846kms.
Ministry of Road Transport & Highways had taken the initiative of re-numbering most of the highways in India a couple of years ago. India has more than 200 national highways totalling to a length of 70,000+ kilometres which is maintained by the NHAI (National Highway Authority of India).
The logic behind numbering is as follows:
All North-South highways will carry EVEN number
All East-West highways will have ODD numbers
All major Highways will be single digit or double digit in number
North-South highways will increase their numbers from East to West. For example, a particular North-South highway in Central India or Western India will have a higher number than the one in East India. To be specific, now you can guess that NH4 is somewhere in East India whereas highway 44 may be towards the west of India while both runs north-south due to the even numbering
Similarly, East-West highways will increase their numbers as we move from North to South. By this logic NH1 will be running East-West somewhere in North India while NH 83 may be somewhere down south. Of course, there may be a minor confusion among some roads that may be running diagonally in stretches
THREE digit numbered highways are secondary routes or branches of a main highway. For example, 144, 244, 344 etc will be the branches of the main National highway 44. Please note that since NH44 (NS Corridor) runs the length of the country from North to South a side shoot say 144 may be up north while something like 944 may be down south
Suffixes A, B, C, D etc are added to the three digit sub highways to indicate very small spin-offs or stretches of sub-highways. For example, 966A, 527B etc
