NHAI resumes work on ₹9,000-cr Dwarka expressway

The National Highway Authority of India is all set to resume the construction work on the main carriageway of the Dwarka expressway. The authority has already given a go-ahead to the contractor to start the pending work. It will take around ten months to complete the entire work. 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 ₹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 awarded to Larsen & Toubro, while the Delhi phase to J Kumar Infra Projects. Delhi-Gurgaon section of NH-8 is a part of the Delhi-Jaipur-Ahmedabad-Mumbai and also an arm of the Golden Quadrilateral that has over 3 lakh passenger cars plying every day.

The project came to the authority 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 and work in the Haryana portion began in November 2019, while construction for the Delhi portion began in September 2020. The contractors were given a two-year time frame for the 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.