The Centre will deploy Network Surveillance Vehicles (NSVs) to identify potholes and assess road conditions across national highways, road transport and highways minister Nitin Gadkari said. Contractors, consultants and officials found responsible for poor quality will face penalties and possible blacklisting, he said at a CII conference in New Delhi. The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) has intensified quality monitoring, helping reduce reported construction-quality problems by 30 per cent, according to Gadkari. The National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) is using NSVs to monitor pavement quality, plan repairs and feed information into artificial intelligence-based systems including the RAMS Data Lake. The vehicle-mounted, multi-sensor platforms assess roads at speeds of 40–80 km/h. Gadkari said the ministry had blacklisted several manufacturers of bearings and expansion joints over quality concerns and was following a zero-tolerance approach to lapses. The ministry is also deploying AI-based Advanced Traffic Management Systems across about 1,000 km of highways in the first phase to track traffic movements in real time. Gadkari linked improved infrastructure with lower logistics costs and said India’s costs had fallen from 16 per cent of gross domestic product two years ago to 9 per cent. He said India’s ambition to become a $5 tn economy depended on stronger infrastructure spanning water, power, transport and communications, and added that every Rs. 100 spent on infrastructure generated an economic impact of Rs. 325. The minister said discussions were under way with the Bihar chief minister on an agreement under which NHAI would dredge rivers without charge and use the silt in highway construction, potentially reducing flood risks. Speakers at the conference also stressed lane discipline, alternative and biofuels, road durability, environmental sustainability and technological readiness. Industry representatives said infrastructure investment remained a fundamental driver of long-term bitumen demand and required an ecosystem covering aggregates, fuels, bitumen and advanced materials.