India Today – 2 March 2026 – India Today

Seven hours on a good day. Longer if traffic near Meerut is clogged up or roadwork has turned the highway into a bottlenecked trench. His parents in Delhi are getting older. Time, he says, is never enough and it is the only thing that stops him from visiting them often. By mid-2026, that grim arithmetic of distance and delay may change forever.

The Delhi- Dehradun Expressway promises to cut the journey to roughly two and a half hours. Not merely a saving of time—it promises a fundamentally different life. After years of delays, flagship expressways across India are nearing completion, promising shorter travel times and a boost to economic growth By AVISHEK G. DASTIDAR Behind such changing realities lies the Bharatmala Pariyojana, the govern- ment’s flagship highway development programme started a decade ago to overhaul India’s road network through a corridor-based approach.

It covers about 34,800 km of highways at an estimated cost of Rs 5.35 lakh crore. As of January, projects covering 21,783 km out of the awarded 26,425 km stand constructed, spending a little over 99 per cent of that money. With new project sanctions discontinued a couple of years ago, the entire road-building machinery moved to completion and enterprise mode. The result: after years of missed deadlines, some of India’s most ambitious projects are finally inching toward completion. If most of them open as scheduled, it would be the largest change in highway connec- tivity since the Golden Quadrilateral, impacting India’s every corner.

The Delhi-Dehradun Expressway cuts through the Shivaliks via long tunnels (see The Last Mile), while the Delhi-Mumbai Expressway forms the spine of a new northwest logistics axis. Ahmedabad is drawn closer to the pro- posed industrial city of Dholera. Half- day journeys between Bengaluru and Chennai are compressed into a single four-hour run. Amritsar is brought closer to Jamnagar via Bathinda, con- necting energy, port and refinery hubs. The Lucknow-Kanpur stretch will be a swift 30-45-minute drive.

When the Delhi-Amritsar-Katra Expressway opens, Amritsar will be just four hours from Delhi, and Katra six—down from a gruelling 13-hour journey. The Gurugram-Pataudi highway provides direct access to the Dwarka Express- way, easing connectivity around one of the NCR’s most persistent choke points.

ven if he is new to leadership, Tarique Rahman’s arrival at the helm of Bangladesh is a comfort- ing restoration of normalcy. What we could have had instead is a descent into anarchy, a plunge into radicalism or an unholy cocktail of both. Compared to that, the non-virtues here are decidedly milder. In a fa- miliar South Asian pattern, we have a legatee of one part of Bangladesh’s political binary: Tarique, 60, is the son of former prime minister Begum Khaleda Zia and former president Ziaur Rahman, founder of the Bangladesh Nat- io nalist Party (BNP).

So, he inherits the political DNA of a formation that has historically been less friendly to India, as well as more accommodating of Islamism, compa red to its arch-rival, the Awami League led by Sheikh Hasina. A natural tilt towards Pakistan was implicit in this. But this misses a duality at the heart of the BNP.

In 2026, the re- sounding mandate Tarique got is also one that represents Bangladesh’s refusal to hand over its destiny to rampaging religious fundamenta l ism. For India, that is a good start. The eastern neighbourhood reclaims its equilibrium in some measure. Hasina’s overtly pro-India sta- nce, sustained since 2009, had become the cor- nerstone of New Delhi’s South Asia strategy. The Awami years saw the dismantling of cross- border bases of Northeast insurgent groups, contributing to stability in that region.

But within Bangladesh, that very proximity turned into a liability as Hasina became increasingly authoritarian. Anti-Hasina sentiment was often refracted as anti-India rhetoric. That was hardly the desired dividend of diplomacy. So, if Tarique seeks to assert a ‘Bangladesh First’ stance, mature pra g matism dictates that New Delhi see it not as hostility but as a political necessity it can live with. This is the logic behind Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s swift move to congratu- late Tarique.

He was the first global leader to do so. The alternative scenarios were far more troubling. In his belated turn as head of state, economist Muhammad Yunus did far more than stall infrastructure projects: his two-year interim government openly fanned anti-India sentiment, Yunus himself not shying from striking a controversial tone with throwaway remarks, say, on the “landlocked” Northeast. India was staring at the spectre of a power vacuum or an inimical regime led by Islamists. That would have meant India’s eastern neighbourhood turning into a staging post for Pakistan or, worse, for China.

Big-power rivalry just across India’s borders would have created new uncertainties. A stable, legitimate and mainstream government averts that possibility. New Delhi must now move with tact to resolve all outstanding issues. India’s first concern is security. Being assuaged on that front is predicated on Tarique shed- ding the more unsavoury bits from BNP’s past.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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