The virtuous circle of better rural roads

Overview

Investor attention to India’s road sector tends to focus on the national highways owing to the government’s proactive policies to attract private funds for modernizing and widening the 70,500 km network that carries 40-45 per cent of the country’s traffic. But the central government-funded rural roads programme, which involves building and upgrading 2.6 million km of what for the most part are dirt tracks, is lifting sales of companies ranging from autos to fast-moving consumer...