Highways Fuel India’s Real Estate Boom Across Emerging Corridors

India’s real estate growth is clipping along fast, quite literally opening up new national highways and expressways for hitherto untapped lands for residential, commercial, and industrial development.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has announced and laid foundation stones for 114 national highway projects all over the country by 2024. These corridors are high speed, with travel times shrinking, better access for remote areas, and, in the process, turning an obscure location into real estate hot spots.

“Connectivity is the backbone of urban expansion,” says Arvind Patel, MD, Patel Infrastructure. “Highways reduce time of travel to the minimum, enabling such areas to be introduced to the real estate conversation, which were previously left out.”

Take the Delhi-Mumbai Expressway, for instance; distances have become much shorter than before. Areas in NCR, Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh are now much more reachable. With the lesser travel time, house purchasers and investors look past saturated city cores to affordable, better-connected suburbs.

The new connectivity will create micro-markets, sparking investments in infrastructure, schools and malls to hospitals and warehousing parks. Sohna (Haryana), Jewar (Noida), and Dholera (Gujarat) demonstrate their transformation by the highways.

“Hence, highway corridors would become industrial and logistics zones,” Patel said. “Once freight prices become lower and seamless movement becomes a way of life, businesses set in – and real estate follows.”

The growth is not merely in housing, but also in rental markets mushrooming side by side with these corridors. Commercial complexes, mixed-use projects, and tier towns will follow suit. For instance, Panvel near Mumbai, NH-24 near Ghaziabad, and the stretch between Bengaluru and Tumkur have already caught this cascading effect.

Plans like the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC) and Gati Shakti Master Plan are intended to link the transport infrastructure to economic development. Even the developers are tying their projects to these mega corridors in the hope that gains would be actualized in the long term.