New Delhi, May 8: The national highways will soon have a ‘scientific, systematic and meaningful identity’. The Ministry of Shipping, Road Transport & Highways has invited bids for a ‘rationalised’ numbering system for 66,754 kilometres of national highways. It would replace the current NH1 to NH228 numbering system. The plan is to rename the national highways with a sophisticated numbering system that is direction and area specific and is based on an easy to understand grid. The ministry plans to award consultancy study on the renaming/ renumbering exercise by July and estimates that by year-end it would have at hand a comprehensive study with cost estimates and various numbering possibilities to work on.

The ministry has said in its bid document that the numbering across national highways at present is not based on any scientific method and hence, a systematic approach needs to be adopted. The new numbering system should preferably be alpha-numeric and be able to indicate direction — whether the road is going along East-West or North-South. The ministry wants a unique numbering system for important corridors like Golden Quadrilateral, North-South-East-West corridor and expressways. The numbering system should have the flexibility to accommodate new roads that would be declared national highways in future and additions such as bypasses and re-alignments.

The Centre wants consultants to review and explore international practices being followed for road numbering, besides reorganising the kilometre stone numbers based on the new renumbering system. The kilometre stone numbering should be so organised that it is state and area specific along with signposts that can indicate the highway chain.

The ministry is impressed with the US highway numbering system. The US highways are marked with black and white badge-shaped signs and assigned one to three digit numbers. The north-south routes are indicated with odd numbers and east-west routes with even numbers.

Soon after independence, India had 21,000 km of national highways and these were numbered starting with NH1, as per the assumed importance of the road at that time. Thus, the road from Amritsar to Delhi was named NH1. NH2, NH4, NH8 were christened on the same basis. The highway network has now expanded to over 66,754 km and yet there is no underlying trend or grid system on which it is based.