Union Ministers Lay Foundation For Delhi-Mumbai Greenfield Expressway

Union Ministers Nitin Gadkari, Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley laid the foundation stones for the Delhi-Mumbai Greenfield Expressway and the 8-lane access controlled Dwarka Expressway earlier this week. The Delhi-Mumbai Expressway is one of the more ambitious projects for the central government and will boost connectivity between the two commercial cities in the future, and dramatically reduce the travel time from the current 24 hours to just 13 hours. The distance between the two cities will also be reduced from 1450 km to 1250 km.

Speaking at the event, Minister of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) said, "The greenfield Delhi-Mumbai Expressway will be India's longest expressway at 1,320 km and would reduce the travel time between the metropolises to 13 hours from the present 24 hours." The Delhi-Mumbai Greenfield Expressway will be connected via Vadodara in Gujarat and is being built at an estimated cost of Rs. 90,000 crore.

दिल्ली-मुंबई एक्सप्रेस वे और द्वारका एक्सप्रेस वे का शिलान्यास केंद्रीय मंत्री @SushmaSwaraj जी, @arunjaitley जी, हरियाणा के मुख्यमंत्री @mlkhattar जी, तथा अन्य गणमान्य जनों की उपस्थिति में सम्पन्न हुआ, इसकी कुछ तस्वीरें।#PragatiKaHighway #NamumkinAbMumkinHai pic.twitter.com/BGsVYNTC1d

— Nitin Gadkari (@nitin_gadkari) March 8, 2019

The project is part of the central government's Bharatmala Pariyojna for the expansion of the road network across the country. The existing Delhi-Mumbai National Corridor is one the busiest and most critical routes of the national highways network, witnessing an average traffic of more than 80,000 PCUs per day. The corridor though is increasingly getting congested with the additional traffic and hence the email will be necessary in the future.

The Greenfield Expressway is being developed in two stages with Delhi and Vadodara being connected, which will then be linked up with the proposed Vadodara-Mumbai Expressway. Gadkari further said at the event that the project has a potential to generate 50 lakh man-days of employment during construction and the expressway will be operational within 30 to 36 months from the start of construction. The project will also help reduce the distance to other economic centres including Kota, Bhopal and Indore from Delhi by about 100 km. The new expressway is also said to be India's most environment-friendly expressway and will have a tree cover of 20 lakh trees and rainwater harvesting system at every 500 metres.

Meanwhile, the Dwarka Expressway is an 8-lane access controlled project that is being built at a cost of Rs. 9000 crore. The expressway will start from Shiv Murti and terminate near Kherki Daula on NH-8. The 29 km expressway is aimed to ease congestion on this route between the Delhi and Gurgaon section that is currently carrying traffic of over 3 lakh PCUs, which is causing severe congestion. The Dwarka Expressway has been conceived as a bypass of Gurgaon and stretches 18.9 km in Haryana and 10.1 Kms in Delhi. It will also connect with the Indira Gandhi International Airport (IGI) from Dwarka side of the expressway.