Uttar Pradesh is gearing up to throw open the Purvanchal Expressway to public from January 26 next year ahead of the deadline, The Economic Times reported quoting state additional chief secretary (home) Awanish K Awasthi.
In July 2018, Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Azamgarh, Uttar Pradesh laid the foundation stone for the ambitious expressway project. The deadline for its completion is April 2021, 30 months after work began.
The 340-km long six-lane Purvanchal expressway will link the state capital Lucknow with Ghazipur, the easternmost district of UP, passing through Barabanki, Faizabad, Amethi, Sultanpur, Azamgarh and Mau. It will provide the backward districts along the eastern boundary of the state seamless connection to the National Capital Region via Lucknow, Agra and Noida through the Lucknow-Agra Expressway and the Yamuna Expressway. The Purvanchal Expressway project is being developed at a cost of Rs 22,500 crore.
Despite the Covid-19 pandemic, work is on in full swing across three main expressways that the state is currently deveoping: Purvanchal Expressway, Buldelkhand Expressway, and Gorakhpur Link Expressway.
Earlier last month, the Uttar Pradesh Expressways Industrial Development Authority (UPEIDA) said that the construction work on the is going on at full speed and 51.23% of physical progress has been achieved overall.
The expressway is being built under the EPC (Engineering, Procurement and Construction) model, which means that the contractor will be responsible for all the activities from design, procurement, commission, construction to the handover of the project to the end-user.
UPEIDA divided the project into eight packages and awarded it to firms. Three firms — Gayatri Projects Limited, GR Infraprojects and PNC Infratech Limited are executing two packages each while Apco Infra Private Limited and Oriental Structural Engineering have been awarded one package each.
Gayatri Projects Ltd is working on package one and two, Apco Infratech Pvt Ltd on package 3, GR Infra Projects Ltd on package 4 and 7, PNC Infratech Ltd on package 6 and 7 and Oriental Structures Pvt Ltd on package 8.
According to details shared by UPEIDA, as on 8 August 2020, the overall progress of package one is 44.57 per cent, package two is 49.56 per cent, package three is 67.38 per cent, package four is 50.4 per cent, package five is around 50.4 per cent, package six is around 49 per cent, package seven is around 48.7 per cent, package eight is around 49.8 per cent.
The ET report also quoted Awasthi as saying that the Bundelkhand Expressway, whose foundation stone was also laid by the PM, will be made operational by the end of 2021. This expressway is important as it will service the upcoming defence corridor in UP and help investors get a fast road link to Delhi, he said.
290-kilometer-long Bundelkhand Expressway was proposed by Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath in April 2017, just months after he came to power.
As its name suggests, the expressway passes through the districts in UP’s part of Bundelkhand — Chitrakoot, Banda, Hamirpur, Mahoba, Jalaun and Auraiya. The expressway takes off from Bharatkoop on National Highway 35, which is also called the Varanasi- Banda road, in the Chitrakoot district, and ends near Kudrail village in Etawah district on the Lucknow-Agra Expressway.
The expressway will link Chitrakoot with the Agra-Lucknow expressway in Etawah, which in turn is linked to the National Capital Region (NCR) through the state’s two operational expressways — 302-km Lucknow-Agra Expressway and the 165-km Yamuna Expressway.
UP is also planning to invite international bids for a private-public partnership (PPP) to construct one of the country’s longest expressways, the 628-km long Ganga Expressway from Meerut to Prayagraj, at a cost of Rs 33,000 crore.