[wheelguy]

The highway will pass through the economically backward areas of Haryana, Rajasthan, Gujarat and Maharashtra, which will help the Centre save Rs 16,000 crore on land acquisition.

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BENGALURU: The government is working on an electric highway between New Delhi and Mumbai at a cost of about Rs 1 lakh crore and has already awarded 60% of the contract for that, Nitin Gadkari, union minister for road transport and highways, said.

“It will be a 1,300 km, 12-lane green highway, and our target is to complete it before January 26, 2024,” he said on the sidelines of an event organised by TVS Motors to mark its entry into the electric scooter segment.

The highway will pass through the economically backward areas of Haryana, Rajasthan, Gujarat and Maharashtra, which will help the Centre save Rs 16,000 crore on land acquisition. Gadkari had said in Parliament in July that his ministry, in collaboration with the heavy industries department, will pilot a 10-km electric highway along the Delhi-Mumbai expressway. The infrastructure included overhead cables and substations for the trial run.

Since 2016, there have been three demonstration projects of electric highways globally, including a trial run on the A5 motor highway outside Frankfurt in May. “We are thinking of making it an e-highway and are discussing with companies who have the technology in Germany, USA, Sweden for electric double decker bus and electric truck,” he Gadkari said.
Gadkari said the government is mulling more measures to encourage electric vehicles, including a policy to have charging stations for buses and cars on highways near petrol stations.

Source: ET Auto

[KL01toKA03]

With a fraction of the cost, the government could set up fast charging networks or subsidize EVs. Instead, they plan a highway with overhead cables, which can be used only by a very small set of vehicles.

As a demonstration of technology, I am okay with a short stretch of highway with overhead cables. But, to do this on such a large scale is a waste of public money. Sure, plan all new highways with the scope for adding overhead cables. But, surely there a better ways of spending that money today.

[Shreyans_Jain]

This kind of announcements which involve technology that is not in commercial use anywhere in the world, technology whose pilot runs proved inefficient and costly even in developed countries.... they remind me of the children’s story The Emperor has no clothes’. The state of our trucking is that our highways are full of 15-20 year old smoke bleaching underpowered overloaded behemoths driven by underpaid and overworked drivers. Why do you want to waste so much public money on this kind of exercise in extravagance. Sorry, but such a project will be like the massive stadiums of Pyongyang - massive undertakings with hardly any real utility. The proverbial white elephants.