New Delhi: The National Highways Authority of India (NHAI), in association with the Department of Higher Education, has launched the NHAI Internship Program along with a dedicated internship portal, aimed at providing hands-on, real-world experience to students across the country in national highway development projects.
The programme was launched by Secretary, Department of Higher Education, Ministry of Education, Shri Vineet Joshi, and NHAI Chairman Shri Santosh Kumar Yadav, in the presence of senior officials from NHAI, the Ministry of Education and the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE).
To ensure wider accessibility and transparency, NHAI has introduced a dedicated internship portal that will serve as an integrated platform for offering internship opportunities across more than 150 major national highway projects nationwide. Each project will host up to four interns, creating an initial pool of nearly 600 students from institutions including IITs, NITs and AICTE-affiliated colleges.
The portal offers internship durations of one month, two months and six months, aligned with academic requirements and industry exposure. Selected interns will receive a stipend of ₹20,000 per month to support learning and professional development.
The initiative is aligned with the National Education Policy 2020, which emphasises experiential learning, industry exposure and credit-linked internships. Under the programme, interns will actively participate in ongoing projects and gain field-based exposure to both technical and managerial aspects of national highway planning, engineering and implementation.
While the programme primarily targets civil engineering students, it also offers opportunities for students from information technology, electronics and electrical engineering disciplines, particularly in areas such as advanced traffic management systems and electronic toll collection.
The winter internship component of the programme received an encouraging response, with around 250 students participating. In addition, a six-month internship programme for final-year undergraduate engineering students will commence from January 19, 2026, for which around 500 applications have already been received. The programme is expected to be extended to postgraduate students in the future.
According to NHAI, the internship initiative reflects its continued focus on skill development and aims to create a strong talent pipeline to support the country’s infrastructure development.
