Dwarka Expressway: All You Need To Know About India's First 8-Lane Highway

Union Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari on Sunday shared a video showing glimpses of the Dwarka Expressway, also called the Northern Peripheral Road or NH 248-BB. The 27.6 km long project is currently under construction and will connect Delhi's Dwarka with Kherki Daula toll plaza in Gurugram. Calling it a “marvel of engineering”, Mr Gadkari said that the project will be opened to the public in three to four months. The transport minister also said that people travelling on the Dwarka Expressway will remember the experience for 100 years.

Here's all you need to know about the Dwarka Expressway in five points:

1) The expressway will reduce the travel time between Dwarka to Manesar to 15 minutes. The distance between Manesar and Indira Gandhi International Airport can now be covered in 20 minutes while the travel time between Manesar and Singhu border will come down to just 45 minutes.

2) The Dwarka expressway has been built using two lakh tonnes of steel -- 30 times what took to build the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Besides steel, about 20 lakh cubic meters of cement concrete, six times what was used to build Dubai's Burj Khalifa, went into the construction of the project.

Marvel of Engineering: The Dwarka Expressway! A State-of-the-Art Journey into the Future ????#DwarkaExpressway #PragatiKaHighway #GatiShakti pic.twitter.com/Qhgd77WatW

— Nitin Gadkari (@nitin_gadkari) August 20, 2023

3) The expressway starts at the 20-km mark of NH 48 (old NH 8) at Shiv Murti in Mahipalpur, Delhi, and ends at the 40-km mark near Kherki Daula Toll Plaza in Gurugram. It's been planned as an alternate road link between the national capital and Gurugram to ease the traffic on the Delhi-Gurugram Expressway.

4) Once functional, this will be India's first eight-lane elevated expressway. The total length of the four-pack motorway is 563 kilometres.

5) During the construction of the Dwarka Expressway, at least 1,200 trees were re-transplanted, another first for India. Besides that, the country's first 8-lane 3.6 km long urban tunnel also forms part of the Dwarka expressway.