~25K-cr expressway to halve Delhi-amritsar travel time
Soon, travel time between New Delhi and Amritsar will be halved with Union Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari on Tuesday approving ~25,000 crore for a new expressway project, aimed at promoting religious tourism.
The project, a long-standing demand of the Sikh community, will be a green field under the Centre’s Bharatmala scheme.
The city of Amritsar is famous for the Golden Temple or Harmandir Sahib, one of the highest seats of power in Sikh religion. It is visited by over four million tourists from across the world every year. The road is part of the larger expressway that would eventually terminate at Katra in Jammu & Kashmir. The town is home to the Hindu holy shrine of Vaishno Devi shrine.
The proposed expressway would have a completely different alignment from the existing highway that connects Delhi to Amritsar and would reduce the travel time between the two cities by half.
The alignment of expressway was firmed up in January 2019 and the process of land acquisition has been initiated, an official statement by the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways said.
According to the earlier proposal, the government had envisaged a Delhi-katra Expressway and it would pass through Amritsar. Now, it came up with conceived DelhiAmritsar-katra Expressway under Bharatmala. The expressway that was earlier proposed was a mix of new roads and expansion of the existing stretches, and was planned to be developed in two phases.
The Centre has decided for development of new connectivity to Amritsar City from Nakodar via Sultanpur Lodhi, Goindwal Sahib, Khadoor Sahib as part of the Delhi-amritsar Expressway.
Further, the road from Amritsar to Gurdaspur would be fully developed and made completely signal free. With this, traffic would have option to travel to Gurdaspur onwards from Nakodar i.e. via Amritsar or via Kartarpur.
The new alignment essentially covers a significant number of Sikh holy sites —Sultanpur Lodhi, Goindwal Sahib, Khadur Sahib as well as the recently developed Dera Baba Nanak/kartarpur Sahib International Corridor in Punjab.
With this expressway, travel time from Amritsar to International airport Delhi would reduce to about 4 hours from present about 8 hours. This would fulfil one of long standing demand of people of Punjab, the official statement said.
Gadkari has requested the Punjab administration to support the National Highways Development Authority of India to expedite land acquisition for the proposed expressway.