KMP expressway to be completed in June: Khattar

Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar said on Saturday that the Kundli-Manesar-Palwal (KMP) Expressway will be inaugurated soon after the construction work is completed in June.

Khattar said that the construction work on KMP Expressway should have been completed in 2010.

"The present government, soon after coming to power, restarted work on the expressway and now it is nearing completion," Khattar said here.

The 53-km Palwal-Manesar stretch of the ambitious KMP Expressway was opened for traffic in April 2016, nearly seven years behind schedule.

The Palwal-Manesar stretch was completed at a cost of Rs 457.81 crore.

The original deadline for the 136 km KMP expressway was July 2009 but the project got mired in controversies and litigation with deadlines being continuously extended.

The expressway project is expected to help ease traffic flow, especially of heavy vehicles, through national capital New Delhi. It will pass through five districts in Haryana -- Sonipat, Jhajjar, Gurgaon, Mewat and Palwal.

The KMP expressway will connect four major national highways (NH), NH-1 (Delhi-Ambala-Amritsar), NH-2 (Delhi-Agra-Varanasi-Dankuni), NH-8 (Delhi-Jaipur-Ahmedabad-Mumbai) and NH-10 (Delhi-Hisar-Fazilka-Indo-Pak border).

It will significantly reduce the traffic from north Indian states to central, western and south India and vice versa.

The earlier concessionaire, KMP Expressway Limited, failed to complete the work even up to December 2014, despite warnings from the Haryana government. The previous Congress government (2005-2014) in Haryana, led by Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda, had launched the project.

--IANS

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