NEW DELHI: The country’s first 8-lane elevated urban Dwarka expressway, an essential part of the `60,000 crore plan to de-congestion Delhi, was inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday.
The 29-km-long expressway, which includes tunnels, underpasses, flyovers, and elevated structures, was built at a cost of Rs 4,100 crore and is designed to ease congestion on existing NH-48 and provide smoother traffic flow between Delhi and Gurugram.
Of the total length, 18.9 km falls in Haryana, while the remaining 10.1 km is in Delhi. Union Minister of Road Transport and Highway Nitin Gadkari commented that the new expressway will change the travel experience between Delhi and Haryana and the lives of the people of the region. The travel time between Delhi and Gurugram will be reduced by at least 20 minutes.
The minister said Delhi’s Urban Extension Road-2 (UER-2) would be completed in the next two months and reduce the traffic towards Dhaula Kuan by 70 per cent, and the time for travel from Panipat to Delhi airport will be down to half an hour.
The UER-2 or NH-344M is a 75.7-km-long, 6-lane expressway in Delhi-NCR. It starts from NH-44 at Alipur, passes Rohini, Mundka, Najafgarh, and Dwarka, and ends at the Delhi–Gurgaon Expressway on NH-48 near Mahipalpur.
Gadkari said the project was also environmentally friendly as 30,000 tons of waste were used in the construction.
The 10.1 km-long expressway in Delhi connects to Basai in Haryana. It has an 8.6-km-long elevated section and an 8-lane main carriageway, with features like traffic signal-free lanes, four vehicular underpasses, and an elevated service road at five major junctions, subways, footpaths, and cycle tracks, as well as rainwater harvesting and groundwater recharge facilities.
The section also features one of the widest railway-over-bridges, with 16 lanes, and one of the longest ‘bow spring steel bridges’, at 125 metres. On March 9, 2019, the then Union ministers, Sushma Swaraj, Arun Jaitley and Nitin Gadkari had, laid the foundation stone for Dwarka Expressway.