MISSION DECONGEST

SOMETHING is changing in and around the capital.

- ANUP VERMA @ New Delhi

It is fast becoming the most dominant flower around which a bouquet of massive, state-of-the-art highways is being created in the NCR.

Once completed, it will turn the city into an island, which is connected to the national grid of roads while maintaining its infrastructural and access autonomy.

At the heart of this transformation lies one of the largest road infrastructure overhauls in the country, which is aimed at easing chronic traffic congestion in and around Delhi. The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MORTH), as the anchor ministry behind the overhaul, is executing a multilay ered strategy involving completed, ongoing, and upcoming national highway projects designed to transform mobility in the region.

It is a massive 2,320 km plan, involving Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Punjab, Uttarakhand, and Jammu and Kashmir. The MORTH data shows that it has already achieved 69 per cent completion.

A need for scale The MORTH ministry says the government has already completed planned road develop ment work spanning 1,578 km, which were delivered at a cost of ₹63,934 crore, while the projects that have been awarded to implementing agencies and are in various stages of completion cover 594 km, worth 34,589 crore. Moreover, the government is planning to execute projects for another 128 km, which will cost around 23,850 crore.

At Delhi Dialogues, Union Minister of State for the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways and Ministry of Corporate Affairs Harsh Malhotra said that the capital region witnessed unprecedented highway development in the past decade, whose momentum would continue to grow with several more key corridors progressing toward completion.