‘Vishwakarma’ Akhilesh Srivastava’s Modern Highways off to Flying Start

Author: Rishi Vale

The Government of India is undertaking a constellation project to modernise highways and put the country in league of the nations with futuristic infrastructure. Besides highway modernisation, the cluster initiative also complements the GoI’s initiative to digitalise and bring transparency to the public sector.

Akhilesh Srivastava, Chief General Manager (CGM) of the highways division of the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI), is at the helm of the undertaking that is already in full swing.

The project includes Wayside Amenities (WSA), Electronic Toll Collection (ETC), GPS tolling, Advanced Traffic Management System (ATMS), Online Dispute Resolution (ODR), Sukhad Yatra, Drones and Remote Sensing for highways, Greenways, and many others.

  1. The WSA includes advanced civic amenities and is aimed at revamping commuter experience on national highways with modern comforts.
  2. The ETC enables instant and automatic fee deduction at Toll plazas, eliminating the need for motorists to stop at Toll gates.
  3. GPS tolling is a less used and relatively new method of invoicing and collecting toll. If successful, the method will allow instant deduction of toll fee through a system that detects driver coordinates on the highway and initiates invoice generation. This will entirely eliminate the need for having Toll gates.
  4. The ATMS incorporates advanced technologies and software into one central database to manage highway incidents including accidents, grid locks, traffic jams, natural disasters, toll fraud, etc. and automatically dispatch relevant services such as ambulance, tow-away trucks, excavators, cranes, among others.
  5. ODR uses advanced technology that digitalises cyber arbitration, mediation, and conciliation for the expeditious resolution of contract disputes between various parties in the highways sector and the construction industry.
  6. Sukhad Yatra is a highway-utilities application that provides users with tools to locate and navigate to amenity centres in proximity to their coordinates on national highways, pinpoint highway locations, pre-pan highway journeys, and file grievances against highway infrastructure and authorities.
  7. UAVs (drones) and LiDARs (remote sensing technologies) are being used by the highway authorities to monitor highway projects and prepare their DPRs and enable traffic and road asset management systems.

GPS tolling and ODR are in their pilot phases while the other initiatives in the constellation project are in their later stages of completion.

Recognising these and other accomplishments of CGM Akhilesh Srivastava, the Construction Industry Development Council (CIDC), a tripartite government body in the construction industry, recently conferred on him the Vishwakarma lifetime achievement award.

Also recognising his achievements, the Ministry of Road Transport & Highways (MoRTH) delegated CGM Srivastava to attend the 4th Annual Roads & Highways forum in Singapore in the month of April. There, he will deliver presentations and analyses on topics including India’s highway modernisation projects and the integration of technology in its highway projects, and the impact of the People’s Republic of China’s One Belt One Road (OBOR) initiative on Asia.

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