Centre Clears Rs 14,115-Crore Tunnel and Highway Projects for Delhi-NCR and Uttar Pradesh

The Union Cabinet has approved a mega infrastructure package of Rs 14,115 crore to ease daily commuter gridlocks in the National Capital Region (NCR) and supercharge economic connectivity across industrial and mineral belts of Uttar Pradesh.

Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw announced the multi-crore push, splitting its attention between an ambitious underground tunnel system in Delhi and a high-speed greenfield highway corridor in UP.

Delhi: 6-lane Vasant Kunj-Dwarka tunnel

The Cabinet approved an 8.1-km, six-lane corridor on NH-148AE with an investment of ₹6,969.67 crore to save commuters from daily bottlenecks.

The Alignment: The corridor will start from Dwarka Motorway and will be seamlessly connected to Nelson Mandela Marg in Vasant Kunj. It is a major bypass for travellers coming from Gurugram, Dwarka and IGI Airport directly to South Delhi.

Protecting the Ridge: A twin-tube underground tunnel dug deep below the ecologically sensitive Southern Ridge Forest will be a major component of the project. To leave the surface forest ecosystem completely undisturbed, engineers are using special Tunnel Boring Machines (TBMs).

Timeline: The project is an urban transit project to be built in five years under Hybrid Annuity Mode (HAM).

Uttar Pradesh: Kanpur-Kabrai Greenfield Highway

The other half of the budget, Rs 7,145.14 crore, is heading to western UP for a massive 117.7-kilometre, access-controlled greenfield highway between Kanpur and Kabrai.

Slicing Travel Time: This high-speed corridor, constructed on the Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) Toll model, will whittle the gruelling 3.5 hour journey between Kanpur and Kabrai to a breezy 1.5 hours.

Strategic Economic Link The highway is a component of a larger plan for the Bhopal-Kanpur Economic Corridor. It traverses the districts of Kanpur, Hamirpur and Mahoba and provides a direct lifeline to the Kabrai mining belt, regional defence corridors and a number of big industrial zones.

Timeline This highway is on a much tighter leash, with the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) aiming for completion in just two-and-a-half years.

The twin projects are being billed as a massive economic engine, expected to generate millions of person-days of direct and indirect construction labour, apart from smoothing out regional commutes. regional commutes, the twin projects are being sold as a huge economic engine, expected to produce millions of person-days of direct and indirect construction labour.