Presently 6,500 km of highways are being maintained by

the NHAI using public funds and this number is expected to more than double over the next 5 years.

"Previous maintenance models such as the operate-maintain-transfer (OMT) did not succeed because there was fixed annual increase in payments to the authority irrespective of traffic," Srinivasan said.

Contract tenures were also shorter, leading to poor maintenance. As a result, only 2,500 km of highways have been awarded on OMT so far with just 6-7 firms participating in such projects, the report said.

(This article has not been edited by DNA's editorial team and is auto-generated from an agency feed.)