Traveling within Gurugram is set to become easier by the end of this year, with around 70% construction work on the 18.9km stretch of the Dwarka Expressway likely to be finished this December.
Officials of the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI), responsible for the project, said on Tuesday that the remaining section of the expressway in Delhi will be completed only next year.
The 29km-route is meant to link Shiv Murti on NH8 in Delhi’s Mahipalpur to Kherki Daula in Gurugram via several sectors of the MIllenium City.
“Around 70 to 75% of the work on the Haryana portion of the expressway has been completed, and we are hopeful that we will be able to open the stretch to commuters by December of this year,” a senior NHAI official said. “It will take another six months to finish work on the Delhi portion, so that part of the expressway is unlikely to be ready before mid-2023,” he added.
The Rs 9,000 crore project is primarily meant to ease travel in NCR and provide an alternative route to commuters between Gurugram and Delhi. Currently the main link between the cities is the Delhi-Gurugram expressway, which clogs up with heavy traffic during office rush hours every weekday.
The opening of the Gurugram section of the expressway will ease movement from Kherki Daula to sectors such as 102, 104, 88, and 10A in the city.
“We will open the Haryana part of the expressway as soon as it is completed, the two sections do not need to be opened together. This will at least ease commute within Haryana for the time being,” the official cited above said.
Work on the expressway was announced in 2007 but began only in November 2019; the construction on the Delhi portion even later in September 2020.
It was supposed to end in two years but work has been delayed repeatedly due to complications in shifting existing infrastructure on the route, land litigation, lockdowns during the pandemic and a ban on construction because of air pollution. In March last year, a portion of an elevated road that is part of the route near Daultabad Chowk in Gurugram also collapsed, halting work for another eight months.
NHAI has picked up pace in construction since November last year. The highway authority has also begun work on the cloverleaf that is to be built near the Kherki Daula toll plaza as part of the Dwarka Expressway to allow seamless commute towards critical road networks like the Delhi-Gurugram expressway, Southern Peripheral Road (SPR), Central Peripheral Road (CPR), and the under-construction Delhi-Mumbai expressway.
Source : TOI
