Nitin Gadkari's new plan is going to change how you travel in mountains

In 2022, Nitin Gadkari was upset about how hard mountain travel is for Indians.

So, he set out to build the most cutting edge tech for India's hillsThe crazy part?

Travel time to Kedarnath will be reduced from 8 hrs to just 30 mins!

Here's how ParvatMala will transform India:

When they started out, they wanted to look for a solution that'd increase tourism in these areas as well as build last-mile connectivity to breed the economy in the hills, But increasing tourism has its own problems because even when our tourism is nowhere close to its peak, the traffic and road congestion issues are a lot. Let’s not even get to what happens during a landslide.

So, we need an infrastructure that not only provides relief from current problems but also establishes a way to get in more people without most of them facing hindrances.

In mountainous regions you can’t build roads everywhere. Not only is it tough to build them because of the altitude and smaller area, but also because that destroys the natural beauty of that area.

And, as domestic travel is growing more and more, mountains have been pulling a lot of people.

But the rising demand doesn’t have a good infrastructure solution yet.

The Parvat Mala project (yes Indian Government has a great copywriter) is a PPP or Public Private Partnership,

In which 60% of the funding will come from the government, and the rest will be handled by the companies that are building and operating the project.The aim is to build 250 ropeways across India in the next 5 years.Now, look at this photo carefully.

22% of India's land is in hilly terrain, and we only have 85-100 ropeways. That too mostly for leisure purposes.22% of such a large country.In such a country, building roadways in the hills was the least efficient way to go about transport.

Mountainous regions have a major snow problem, landslide problem, rain problem & what not.And still we never had the single most efficient way of transport in the hills in all weather conditions— ROPEWAY.In Switzerland, people don’t use their cars or buses to reach the top.

Most of them don’t trek either.Their ropeway system is so efficient that it just makes the process of reaching distant areas in the mountains— easy and safe!We often hear news about buses falling down the hill because of dangerous roads.

But in Switzerland, you just park your car at the base, take your stuff, take the ropeway and reach the place you want.Parvat Mala project can bring an end to that problem.The best part about this technology is that it has easy installation.

And it's also eco-friendly.

Think about it — at the end of the day, it’s just rope, boxes, and poles.

All the parts are pre-made — easy to assemble and set up.India’s macro goal is to make ropeway an amazing alternative mode of transport to most hilly areas...

…and promote the tourism and economy of areas that have been too long in the shadows.But the project is currently focusing on solving for those areas which need it desperately.And, invariably, most of them are pilgrim areas.

If you think about pilgrimage as a product offering, then it has extremely high stickiness.Most people want to travel to these places, but there are too many hindrances.Either they lack time early in their life, or they lack the ability to travel later in life.

Parvat Mala is a project that focuses on removing both these hindrances, especially when it comes to pilgrimages.And if you think about it, most of our pilgrimage sites in the mountains are picturesque, but we’d hardly see people travel for the beauty aspect of it.

With an easier way to reach them, places like Kedarnath or Hemkund Sahib will become popular tourist places too.It would also improve engagement from people who aren't that religious but want to travel.It's not like these places aren't already popular among tourists,

but the biggest problem for them is

— DECONGESTION.

Congestion on roads was the biggest motivation behind the Delhi Metro, but imagine what happens in the mountains.

If 80 people are traveling by road, and considering 4 are traveling together, there will be 20 cars that’ll go up, waste fuel, pollute the place, & also create situations where to-and-fro movement is not easy and because you can’t go straight up on the mountains, cause that would be weird & dangerous , you'll have to cover a lot more distance.

Now, if we replace that with something like a Mt. Titlis Rotaire Cable car, it can literally carry all these 80 people in one cable car. So many human hours saved, pollution reduced, and you went up straight while decongesting the already narrow roads.

Where will you see India’s first ropeways?— Kedarnath— Hemkund Sahib— AuliNow, these aren’t any normal ropeways, they are using 3s cable cars that can actually take 6000-8000 people per hour.

But they are not going to be limited to 3s.

They’ll introduce cable cars & various mountain transport mechanisms, including Heavyweight Cable Car, Vermicular, etc. — depending on the terrain and use-case.Now ropeway is not just a great solution for the mountains but also finds a market fit in cities with narrow streets.

Varanasi is set to have the first urban ropeway project in India.Not just that, this is laying the seed for urban & mountainous mobility technology in the country.Since the project is promoting Make in India, all the Austrian and Swiss companies might setup their manufacturing here in India, which would kickstart the indigenous technology ecosystem for this in our country.

And what happens next is what we’ve already witnessed after breeding the indigenous technology of Metro in India after Delhi Metro.