Representational picture: Labourers work at the construction site of a highway bridge. (Reuters)
The Cabinet has today approved building a peripheral highway east of the capital, which will allow thousands of non-Delhi bound trucks and other vehicles to bypass the city.
Here are the 10 big developments in the story:
The move is expected to help check both growing traffic and vehicular pollution in choking Delhi.
The eastern peripheral road, a six-lane highway, will be 135 km long. The road will run through Haryana and Uttar Pradesh.
It will be built at a cost of about Rs 7,558 crore, more than double of the initial cost of Rs 3600 crore.
"Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA), chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has given approval for development of six-laning of Eastern peripheral expressway," an official statement said.
The main object of the project is to improve infrastructure in Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, it said, adding that the development of the expressway will help in uplifting the socio-economic condition of the area it passes through.
It will also generate increased employment potential for local unskilled workers for project activities, it added.
Approval for Delhi's Eastern bypass comes 10 years after the Supreme Court order that it be built. The Supreme Court has said it must be completed by 2018.
The Supreme Court had also ordered the bypass built as a measure to tackle pollution in Delhi, ranked among the world's worst on that count.
About 80,000 trucks enter Delhi every night after 9 pm just to travel through the city to the other side.
A similar bypass highway to the west of Delhi is still incomplete; the Supreme Court has ordered that it should be completed by next year.
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