new delhi, June 27 -- The government is set to roll out an ambitious Rs.2 lakh crore plan to build a 10,000 km network of bypasses and ring roads around about 500 cities and towns over five years in a bid to ease urban congestion and improve travel time and freight movement on national highways, two people aware of the development said. The programme, to run through FY31, marks a significant expansion of the government's earlier plan to build bypasses and ring roads around 50 cities with a population of one million or more, which was reported by Mint earlier. The expanded initiative will extend the government's earlier focus on larger cities to tier-II and tier-III cities and towns along major highways, covering urban centres with populations of at least 100,000, as smaller towns increasingly emerge as congestion hotspots that impede movement of vehicles on highways. "The idea is to take this initiative to roughly 500 cities in the first phase up to 2030," the first person quoted above said on condition of anonymity. As per the 2011 census, India has around 500 cities with a population of 100,000 or more. The ministry of road transport and highways (MoRTH) will assess the traffic situation and choke points across cities nationwide and take action on building bypasses and ring road networks, this person said. Projects are likely to be awarded through a combination of engineering, procurement and construction (EPC), hybrid annuity model (HAM) and build-operate-transfer (BOT) formats, depending on traffic potential and project viability, said the people cited above. The move comes as India's highway development enters a new phase. The national highway network has expanded 61% since 2014 to about 146,572 km, but average vehicle speeds remain around 50 kmph because of congestion, mixed traffic and bottlenecks around cities, according to MoRTH. The plan aims to preserve design speeds of 100-120 kmph by diverting through traffic away from urban centres. The planned network will focus on high-speed corridors, with four-lane and above highways expanding to 43,512 km and operational expressways of over 3,000 km. All projects will be taken up for development as fully access-controlled corridors of minimum four-lane configuration. This would enable the design speed of 100-120 kmph for both freight and passenger vehicles to be maintained over time, the people said. A prohibited development control zone of 15 metres on either side of the highway bypass or ring road will be notified by the state government concerned as a 'green zone' under the state town planning laws, the people said. According to the second person cited above, MoRTH's new plan will ensure long-distance highway traffic is diverted outside the dense city cores, allowing seamless movement of freight and reducing city congestion.Queries emailed to MoRTH on the plan went unanswered.The plan's broad aim is to further reduce logistics costs to help boost investments and growth, the people said. Logistics costs have eased due to goods and services tax reforms, FASTag, eway bills, digital tracking systems, and the expansion of highways and freight corridors under PM Gati Shakti, a digital framework to integrate infrastructure plans across ministries.A spokesperson of Dilip Buildcon Ltd, a highway developer. said that the move is "both timely and necessary"Suprio Banerjee, vice-president & co-group head at Icra Ltd, lauded the move, saying that over the long term, this would support "more predictable travel times, lower vehicle operating costs, improved freight competitiveness and enhanced user experience, thereby aligning India's highway infrastructure with global best practices." Others see the need for a holistic effort to resolve the congestion issue beyond just building highways."...Improving mobility in India will require a strategic and logical approach. Strengthening public transport systems, including metro networks and bus transit, is essential to reduce dependence on private vehicles," said Shailesh Agarwal, partner (infrastructure) at EY India....