From Vizhinjam to Kasaragod: A 769-km journey through Keralam’s fractured infrastructure

An agonizing 33 km/hr cross-state drive along National Highway 66 lays bare the choked roads, delayed projects, and debt trap threatening Keralam’s economic future.

Thiruvanathapuram/Kochi/Kozhikode: A 14.5-foot slab of concrete from the Government Fisheries L.P. School in Kadalundi, in north Keralam, carries more than just student scribbles and a crude painting of local folklore. It carries the weight of memory. When the unsafe school building was slated for demolition in 2024, New York University’s ‘Wall House’—a global initiative preserving history through architectural relics—claimed the wall to feature alongside 300 others at its Abu Dhabi campus.

Then came the question of moving it.

“The biggest challenge was taking it to the Kochi Port,” Munshid Ali, secretary of the Kerala Exporters Forum, tells me. It was his firm that was tasked with the job.

A routine 200-kilometer (km) drive to the port turned into a 10-day logistical nightmare. To move the huge artefact, haulers had to dodge low-hanging overhead power lines and creep along at a snail's pace under the cover of night to avoid choking the region’s narrow roads. The inland journey cost ₹1.9 lakh—over six times the standard rate.

Ironically, the wall’s subsequent 2,779-km voyage across the Arabian Sea to Jebel Ali Port in the United Arab Emirates took nearly half the time, sailing smoothly into port in just six days.

The wall’s slow crawl exposes a glaring paradox in Keralam. The state routinely leads India in human development metrics and boasts an extensive network of 11 national highways and 83 state highways. Yet, on the ground, these vital arteries remain choked, narrow two-lane bottlenecks. Traversing the 650-km expanse of National Highway 66 takes an agonizing 14 to 16 hours—double the time required to cover a similar distance between Delhi and Prayagraj in Uttar Pradesh.

While the rest of the country races ahead with multi-lane, access-controlled expressways, Keralam is only now pushing through its first six-lane upgrade along National Highway 66—a delayed ₹66,000-crore project that experts note is arriving very late.

“National Highway 66 should have been built at least 15 years ago,” Ali believes.

Until it opens, even history must wait in traffic.

Speed test: 33 km/h

The new United Democratic Front government’s white paper on Keralam’s finances lays bare a grim reality: the state is caught in a classic debt trap. Its liabilities are large, committed expenditures—salaries, pensions, and interest payments—are high, and capital expenditure is low. It will borrow ₹35,355 crore this year simply to cover routine operational costs. The paper argues that the only way out of this fiscal tailspin is to aggressively drive economic growth, attract investment, and generate employment.

Yet, that ambition currently appears daunting because of glaring infrastructure bottlenecks.

To test the state of Keralam’s road connectivity and infrastructure—critical for the growth and investment it seeks—I decide to drive from Vizhinjam, near the southern tip, to the state’s border with Karnataka in the north. The distance of 769 km will take 21 gruelling hours. The average speed across the entire journey? A sluggish 33 km per hour.

Day 1: 320 km

It is 4:45 AM on a wet Wednesday, the full moon still casting a slick sheen over the road as I join National Highway 66 near Vizhinjam. Just minutes in, I pass the point where a freshly finished 1.7-km link road joins the highway—a modest stretch that carries outsized significance.

For months after Vizhinjam Port—India’s first deep-water mega container transshipment hub—began operations in December 2024, it moved over 2.2 million TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units) of transshipment cargo between ships, yet not a single container of domestic export-import cargo could leave by land. Entangled in years of land acquisition battles, funding snags, and bureaucratic delays, this link road was only cleared for trade on 18 August this year. It stands as a poster child for Keralam’s fraught relationship with infrastructure.

The initial drive is smooth. I breeze past Aakkulam and the sprawling 768-acre expanse of Technopark Trivandrum, home to 75,000 IT workers. But the illusion of speed vanishes quickly.

Soon, the highway dissolves into a maze of dusty detours. Traffic squeezes into single lanes, crawling at a painful pace. Diversions strike with relentless frequency; in the 90 minutes following Aakkulam, I enjoy a fully finished stretch of highway for a grand total of 10 minutes!

By 6:20 AM, I hit Kollam, the gateway to Keralam’s backwaters. Crossing the Neendakara bridge, the landscape bursts into morning chaos. In the waters below, wooden boats heavy with fresh tuna unload their haul—the neighbourhood is a major seafood export hub.

Heading further north, the roadside offers a glimpse into the state’s cultural obsessions. Faded, wind-whipped flex banners from the football World Cup still cling to light poles, with Lionel Messi’s face reigning supreme over Argentina-crazed villages. But the colourful scenery cannot mask the pace on the road. It takes a frustrating 135 minutes to cover just 102 km.

At Sankaramangalam, home to Kerala Minerals and Metals’ titanium facility, highway construction sits abandoned. Former finance minister K.N. Balagopal attributes the delays to flawed designs and a basic failure to understand local soil dynamics. Originally slated for completion last December, the project now looks poised to drag on for years—a delay the state simply cannot afford.

With tax buoyancy, or the extent to which tax revenue grows in relation to economic growth, dipping below 1 and the once steady flow of Gulf remittances slowing, Keralam’s economic engine is sputtering. As C. Veeramani, director at the Centre for Development Studies in Thiruvananthapuram, notes, the only way to boost revenue is to broaden the state’s production base and capture its economic multiplier effect. To do that, robust road networks are non-negotiable.

Seeking a change of pace, I cut inland at Kayamkulam by 7:45 AM to test the state highways and winding hill routes of Pathanamthitta and Kottayam. Driving past emerald rubber plantations and tranquil backwaters, I loop back to rejoin National Highway 66 at Cherthala by 3:30 PM, only to slam straight back into gridlock at Thuravoor.

Above the bumper-to-bumper crawl, a towering 12-km elevated highway stretches impressively into the sky, fully built—except for its final, unfinished link to the ground, rendering it completely useless.

As the sun begins its dip toward the horizon, locals gather along the scenic Kannangattu bridge. Workers heading home stop to cast hand nets into the backwaters, hoping to catch a fresh dinner. It is a poetic image of coastal life—yet just beyond the railing, the modern world remains stuck in low gear.

I finally roll into Kochi at 6:45 PM, 14 hours after turning the key.

Day 2: 217 km

Leaving Kochi at 9 AM, I set off toward Angamaly, home to a bustling industrial estate and an IT park.

Here, I meet Joy Paul, who runs a small green energy solutions business. He chose Angamaly specifically for its strategic proximity to National Highway 66, the Kochi port, the international airport, and the main rail trunk.

“Despite these advantages, I am at a competitive disadvantage as it takes a lot of time and money to move my products by road,” he tells me.

It is a bottleneck that renders Keralam inherently tough for manufacturing. “It is true that the state’s narrow roads increase transaction costs. Hopefully, it would reduce once the expansion of National Highway 66 is complete,” K.N. Harilal, chairman of the State Finance Commission, tells me later.

From Angamaly, I press on toward Thrissur—the state’s financial centre and gold hub, famous as the birthplace of giants like Kalyan Jewellers and Joyalukkas. The pattern repeats relentlessly: brief, smooth stretches immediately disrupted by chaotic diversions. The passage near Koratty proves particularly clumsy.

By 11:35 AM, I pass Apollo Tyres’ massive manufacturing plant at Perambra, a rare sight in a state with so few large privately-owned industrial facilities.

As I approach Thrissur, highway construction becomes aggressive—and dangerously haphazard. On 5 September, local media reported that eight engineering students from Tamil Nadu died near here when their car slammed into a wrongly parked truck. Locals told reporters it was the third major crash on that exact stretch in three days.

I reach Thrissur at 12:15 PM, eventually rejoining National Highway 66 at Manathala an hour later. Past the turnoff for the temple town of Guruvayoor, the road suddenly opens up. For the next 50 km—the longest uninterrupted stretch of the trip thus far—I glide along a fully completed highway toward Kozhikode, sustaining 80 km/h for the very first time.

At Perumanna, I turn left to enter Kozhikode. The secondary roads shrink drastically; Google Maps estimates 45 minutes to cover a mere 11 km.

This highlights Keralam’s next structural hurdle: upgrading its inland road network. Land acquisition costs are prohibitively high, and state coffers are bare. Yet without widening these feeder arteries, Keralam cannot harvest the full economic rewards of the upgraded National Highway 66.

“The only way is to prioritise borrowing. Instead of using it to fund routine expenditure such as salaries and pension, the state should borrow to create assets like roads. It should tap more into the 50-year interest free loan that Centre offers,” CDS’ Veeramani tells me.

I reach Kozhikode at 4 PM, having logged six hours to cover 217 km.

Day 3: 232 km

I set off from Kozhikode at 10 AM, aiming to cross Keralam’s northern border into Karnataka by early evening before heading on to Mangaluru. Rejoining National Highway 66 at Vengalam, I am immediately greeted by the familiar chaos of construction and traffic snarls. The stretch near Vadakara is particularly troublesome.

Past Thalassery, the landscape shifts as I pass a succession of large multi-specialty hospitals—a clear sign that this region is betting big on medical tourism. I reach Kannur by 12:25 PM.

Along the route, I cross a series of large rivers—the Valapattanam, Tejaswini, Kuppam, Kariangode, and Perumba. These waterways hold immense untapped potential for moving cargo and commuters inland. Recognizing this, the new Keralam government announced Mission Samudra in its recent budget to drive port-led economic development.

A roadside sign notes that Bekal Fort—the 1650 AD stronghold made famous by filmmaker Mani Ratnam’s iconic song sequence, ‘Tu hi re’, in Bombay—lies just 40 km away. Despite its beauty, the fort draws fewer visitors than it deserves due to poor connectivity. Locals remain confident that tourism across northern Keralam will see a sharp revival once National Highway 66 is fully complete.

As I approach Kasaragod around 3 PM, the road clears into a long, finished stretch of National Highway 66. From here, it is a smooth, uninterrupted ride all the way to the Karnataka border 32 km away. I cross into Karnataka at 3:30 PM, bringing the 769-km journey to a close.

Key Takeaways

• ₹35,355 crore: The massive sum the state will borrow this year simply to cover routine operational expenses— salaries, pensions, and interest.
• ₹66,000 Crore: The total cost of the delayed, long-overdue six-lane expansion of National Highway 66 across Kerala.
• 16 hours: Time taken to traverse the 650-km expanse of NH 66, double the time required to cover a similar distance between Delhi and Prayagraj.

About the Author

N Madhavan has been writing on business and economy for more than 30 years now. A Chevening Scholar, he loves longform writing and has had the privilege of honing his skills at The Economist as an intern in the past. He writes across various sectors, with a primary focus on macro-economy, business groups in southern India, and corporate stories. He has worked in newspapers as well as magazines, with bylines in The Financial Express, Business Today, Forbes India and The Hindu BusinessLine. This is his fourth year at Mint where he presently curates the explanatory Primer section and also writes Long Stories. <br><br>Based in Chennai, he is the winner of the Shriram-Sanlam Award for Business Journalism. He loves ground reporting, including travelling in a truck twice between Chennai and Mumbai, to bring life to the stories he works on. He was once almost lynched while reporting on onion prices at Lasalgaon in Maharashtra, a fact he captured in the story he eventually wrote for Business Today. <br><br>Apart from writing, he loves reading, listening to music (Ilayaraja is his favourite composer) and travelling.