With the December deadline fast approaching, the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) has stepped up efforts to finish work on the Gurugram portion of the Dwarka Expressway in time to launch the 19km-stretch this year.
A scaled up workforce is on the job round-the-clock, officials said on Tuesday, adding that they have also deployed more machinery to aid them. “We are on track to ensure the project is completed by December and the expressway is opened to commuters,” a senior NHAI official told TOI.
He said finishing touches such as installing signboards and painting can be carried even after the expressway is opened. “We have increased our workforce by hiring more labourers. Construction is going on all day. We are deploying more machinery and continuously monitoring the project,” the official said.
The 29km-expressway — estimated to cost Rs 9,000 — is meant to be the northern ring road connecting Delhi and Gurugram, an alternative to the National Highway-48. It will start from Shiv Murti in the capital, and will run till Kherki Daula in Gurugram.
Apart from taking the traffic load off of NH-48, the expressway being built along the new sectors in Gurugram will be a key route for lakhs of residents in the NCR city. Eventually, it will also connect the city with the planned expressway that will link India’s largest metropolises: Mumbai and Delhi.
So far, the 18.9km-section of the expressway in Gurugram is set to be launched, but the remaining portion in Delhi will only be ready by mid-2023, officials said.
In Gurugram, one of the critical structures that are still under construction is a cloverleaf intersection of roads (a junction of roads that resembles the pattern of a four-leaved clover) that is being built near the Kherki Daula toll plaza.
The intersection, with a radius of two kilometres, will have four loops that will allow seamless movement towards Delhi-Gurugram expressway, Southern Peripheral Road (SPR), Central Peripheral Road (CPR), and the under-construction Delhi-Mumbai expressway.
Though the cloverleaf was supposed to be finished by October, officials now expect its construction to be completed by November-December.
“It took some time for the movement of traffic to settle in that area even after the diversions were put in place by the traffic police in March. So the work got delayed by a bit. We are expecting the cloverleaf to be completed by November or December. The completion of the entire Gurugram portion of the expressway is dependent on this structure. Other smaller work is also going on simultaneously,” said the official quoted above.
Announced in 2007, work on the Gurugram section of the expressway began in November 2019, while construction in Delhi could start only by September 2020.
The initial deadline for the project was at end of 2021, but work was repeatedly held up due to delays in shifting existing infrastructure, land litigation issues, lockdowns prompted by the pandemic and construction bans due to high air pollution in NCR.
Source : TOI
