Nitin Gadkari, Union Minister for Road Transport and Highways has announced that the Delhi-Mumbai Express Highway first phase would get ready by March 2022. The announcement was made after inspecting Bharuch section of the expressway. With this India will be having the world’s longest highway. The project would get completed in March 2023 in totality. The length of the expressway would be 1,380 km. The plan has been to take it up to Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust (JNPT), Mumbai. Gadkari informed that “now, we are also planning to take it up to Nariman Point.” He also mentioned that the Narmada steel bridge has been built in a record time of 32 months.
The total cost of the highway construction is Rs 98,000 crore. It would be passing through Delhi, Haryana, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Maharashtra. More than 15,000 hectares of land have been acquired across the states to build this expressway. With the new construction, the travel time from Mumbai to Delhi via road gets reduced from 24-26 hours to 12-13 hours if one is travelling by car. Also, economic hubs like Jaipur, Kishangarh, Ajmer, Chittorgarh, Udaipur, Bhopal, Ujjain, Ahmedabad, Vadodra and Surat’s connectivity gets improved. The expressway would be 8 lanes wide.
