From DPR to Infrastructure Intelligence: Rethinking How India Plans, Builds, and Learns from Roads
1. The Problem Before the Road India is building roads at a scale that would have seemed extraordinary a generation ago. Highways and expressways are extending across regions, connecting cities to industrial clusters, linking ports to production centres, and shortening the distance between places that were once separated by difficult terrain. Yet the physical expansion of the road network has exposed another problem: the quality of the knowledge on which individual infrastructure projects are based. The issue is often described as a problem of faulty Detailed Project Reports, or DPRs. When a highway is badly designed, when an alignment creates an unforeseen safety problem, when drainage proves inadequate, or when geological conditions cause difficulties during construction, attention naturally turns to the DPR and the consultants who prepared it. Recent public discussions around highway safety have similarly focused on deficiencies in project reports and on the need for greater account...