PM Modi unveils first leg of Delhi-Mumbai expressway today: Here are the details

Officials said that Union Minister of Road Transport and Highways Nitin Gadkari and Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar will visit the traffic management centre near Sohna on Delhi-Mumbai expressway during the day. Another inauguration programme has been organised at the Hilalpur toll plaza in Nuh where Khattar will be present.

An NHAI official said the Sohna-Dausa stretch is likely to be opened for traffic in the next few days following the inauguration.

The expressway between Sohna in Haryana and Dausa in Rajasthan is the first leg of the Delhi-Mumbai expressway. Real estate developers anticipate that the expressway will give a boost to the region’s market, stimulate growth and result in increased demand for housing and commercial projects.

On Friday, Gadkari tweeted, “Soon to be inaugurated by PM Shri @narendramodi Ji, the Sohna-Dausa stretch of the #Delhi_Mumbai_Expressway will enable a hassle-free 2-hour journey between Delhi and Jaipur.”

Earlier this week, Gadkari had tweeted that the Delhi-Mumbai Expressway is the first expressway developed with a 21-metre median on principles of forgiving highways allowing inward expansion, and called the expressway an “architectural marvel”.

“There would be 40+ major interchanges to provide connectivity to Kota, Indore, Jaipur, Bhopal, Vadodara, Surat and a 3-metre-wide dedicated corridor for laying utility lines including optical fiber cables, pipelines and solar power generation,” he said in the tweet.

Being built at an estimated cost of Rs 98,000 crore, the 1,380-km long Delhi-Mumbai Expressway will be India’s longest expressway and pass through Delhi, Haryana, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Maharashtra. The expressway will reduce travel time between Delhi and Mumbai from 24 hours to over 12-12.5 hours. The eight-lane access-controlled greenfield expressway can be expanded to a 12-lane expressway depending on the volume of traffic.

The Delhi-Mumbai expressway will have 94 wayside amenities including resorts, restaurants, food courts, dormitories, fuel stations, facilities for truckers, logistics parks, a helicopter ambulance service for accident victims and a heliport, which will use drone services for business. Over two million trees and shrubs are planned to be planted along the highway. It is also planned that the expressway will have animal overpasses to facilitate unrestricted movement of wildlife and an automated traffic management system. The expressway will also have provisions for rainwater harvesting at intervals of 500 m, with over 2,000+ water recharge points.

For the construction of the expressway, around 12 lakh tonnes of steel will be consumed, equivalent to building 50 Howrah bridges, and the project is expected to generate 10 crore man-days of employment, Gadkari said in a tweet on Friday.