Exploring Indian Roads - from potholes to expressways!

While I was planning for this trip, the easy and tempting bit was to do a full round of the Golden Quadrilateral. That would have let my odometer run close to 7000 kms or so, without really being too tiring. However, given that GQ only comes till Chennai in South, it clearly wouldn't have defined the periphery of India.

Here are below some stats from the trip. Overall, we travelled 2% of our distance on expressways (Pune-Mumbai) and (Ahmedabad-Baroda). Clearly, expressways in India are being developed and in two years time, significant portion of Golden Quadrilateral, esp. near the metros would be 6-laned and could then probably qualify as expressways.

Fortunately for us, we covered 47% of our distance on Golden Quadrilateral that was ready and some part of East-West and North-South Corridor that were ready too. Clearly, traveling on good quality roads helps a lot to boost up average speed and lowers fuel consumption. As a very rough estimate, we would have probably covered 70-75% of the Golden Quadrilateral. The parts that we didn't were Chennai-Bangalore-Tumukur and the long stretch from Baroda to Delhi.

Another 19% of our jounrey was on good national highways and a couple of very good state highways where one could clock good speeds and were not too congested. These were fantastic roads and at most places on par with the travel experience on GQ.

A significant 20% of our journey was on not really great National Highways or bad state highways. I am also including congested highways under this bracket - the end result of this was that the drives took a lot longer than I had initially expected and we probably drove at an average of 40-45kmph on these roads. Not a great place to be if you are any bit emotionally attached to the tyres, underbody, gear box and mud flaps of your car! :-) The roads that are largely part of this category are:

• Trichy-Rameswaram, Rameswaram-Madurai
• Kanyakumari - Trivandrum - Ernakulam - Palghat (entire Kerala was like a continous city - this state requires massive investments in highways to grow its economy)
• Palghat - Coimbotore- Tumukur - again a relatively poor road, though it wasn't too congested beyond Coimbotore.
• Jamnagar-Morbi - roads in and out of Jamnagar were very bad in deed - it was a rough ride even for a truck going at 10 kmph, i had to sway around the entire width of the road to find spots where the ground clearnace was just right to let my Swift go through
• Sri Ganganagar to Panchkula (congested and speed limiting though the roads were okay
• Panchkula - Ghanauli was very bad, esp. on NH 21A - in between a bridge was broken and we had to take a detour to get back to NH21 from NH21A
• 35 kms either side of Allahabad - we had to get off Golden Quadrilateral and come in to Allahabad for our night halt. There were a couple of very difficult stretches (more details in a separate post)
• Bhuvaneshwar - Puri was congested and narrow for the traffic on this route. Puri to Chilika was a very narrow road, definitely shouldn't be termed as a national highway

Another 6% of our trip was on hilly terrain, most of it to and from Manali. This did have an impact on the overall average speed.

4% of our trip was on GQ that was still getting ready or parts that were being upgraded to 6-lanes. It resulted in relatively slower progress, particularly along the places where a flyover was being constructed.

Finally, we spent 2% of our trip in cities - we tried our level best to avoid cities and were lucky at most times to find a good bye-pass, but at some places, it was just a must to go through the city.

Here are the breakdown of the trip by the types of roads for each day of our travel. A note of caution - these are approximate estimates based on the maps and our experience, the only exact number being the distance that we travelled each day. In any case, that shouldn't matter - it should still give you a decent sense of the mix of roads.