The 29-km expressway — 18.9 km in Haryana and 10.1 km in Delhi — was first proposed by Haryana govt in 2006.
Commuters travelling between Gurugram and Delhi will have to wait for around 18 more months to get a respite from long traffic snarls, with work on the 29-km Dwarka Expressway likely to be finally completed by September 2020. The eight-lane access-controlled highway has been in the making for the last 15 years.
Senior officials in the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) told ThePrint that while a segment of the expressway in Haryana is likely to be completed by August this year, work on the Delhi portion is likely to get over by September 2022. Also called the Northern Peripheral Road, the project was first proposed by the Haryana government in 2006. It was divided into four parts — two phases comprising the Delhi portion of the expressway, and the remaining two comprising the Haryana portion.
The 29-km highway — 18.9 km in Haryana and 10.1 km in Delhi — will start from Shiv Murti in Mahipalpur, pass through Dwarka Sector 21 and Gurugram border and end at Kherki Dhaula.
Providing an alternate road link between Gurugram and Delhi, the Rs 9,000-crore expressway promises to not only decongest traffic on the existing Delhi-Gurgaon expressway, but also ensure better connectivity between Dwarka and parts of south Delhi such as Vasant Kunj, among others. The tender for the Haryana phase of the project was given to Larsen & Toubro, while the Delhi phase to J Kumar Infra Projects.
A senior NHAI official, who didn’t want to be named, told ThePrint the Delhi-Gurgaon section of NH-8, which is a part of the Delhi-Jaipur-Ahmedabad-Mumbai arm of the Golden Quadrilateral, has over 3 lakh passenger cars plying every day.
“This is much beyond the design capacity of this 8-lane highway, leading to severe congestion,” the official said.
A second NHAI official said the project came to the NHAI in 2017 as there were coordination problems between the Haryana and Delhi governments over land acquisition and they could not settle the matter among themselves.
He told ThePrint that work pertaining to the Haryana portion began in November 2019, while work for the Delhi portion began as recently as September 2020.
“We are giving a two-year time frame for completion of projects since the work began. Therefore, the Haryana portion of the Dwarka Expressway should be completed by August 2021, while the Delhi portion should be completed by September 2022,” said the official quoted first.