The apex highway development agency has also launched a dedicated internship portal, opening opportunities across 150-plus national highway projects to ensure transparency and accessibility.
The National Highways Authority of India (NHAI), India’s apex highway development agency, has launched the NHAI Internship Programme in collaboration with the Department of Higher Education to nurture future professionals. The initiative offers aspiring engineers hands-on experience within the country’s largest highway development ecosystem.
The programme was jointly launched by Vineet Joshi, Secretary, Department of Higher Education, and Santosh Kumar Yadav, Chairman, NHAI, in the presence of senior officials from the Ministry of Education, NHAI, and the All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE).
To ensure transparency and accessibility, NHAI has introduced a dedicated internship portal offering opportunities across more than 150 national highway projects. Each project will host up to four interns, creating an initial pool of nearly 600 students drawn from the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), National Institutes of Technology (NITs), and AICTE-affiliated institutions. Internship durations range from one to six months, aligned with academic calendars and industry needs. Selected interns will receive a stipend of ₹20,000 monthly to support learning, mobility, and professional growth.
Aligned with the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, which promotes experiential learning and industry exposure, the programme goes beyond observational training. Interns will actively participate in live projects, gaining field-based insights into how national highways are planned, engineered, and executed.
While the programme primarily targets civil engineering students, it also offers opportunities for those in IT, electronics, and electrical engineering, especially in areas like advanced traffic management systems and electronic toll collection.
The recently concluded winter internship saw participation from around 250 students. A six-month internship for final-year undergraduate engineering students is set to begin on January 19, with over 500 applications already received. NHAI plans to extend the programme to postgraduate students in future.