Work on Dwarka Expressway

The snarl-ravaged Dwarka-Gurgaon commuter can honk with joy.

The Dwarka Expressway, also called the Northern Peripheral Expressway, that will benefit thousands of daily commuters between Dwarka in west Delhi and Gurgaon in Haryana will be ready for use by October this year.

If there is a speedometer to measure the pace of construction, work is going on at more than 100kmph, one instance of over-speeding no one is complaining about. "It will be ready by October 2012," A.K. Maggu, executive engineer of the project, said.

The eight-lane expressway, being developed by the Haryana Urban Development Authority (HUDA), will link Dwarka, cut through Gurgaon and join the National Highway (NH) -8. India Bulls is laying the autobahn.

It will be 18km long, starting from Dwarka, going past Palam Vihar and planned special economic zones in Gurgaon before joining the NH-8 near Kherki Dhaula.

The Dwarka Expressway's biggest draw is it will serve as an alternative to the congested Delhi-Gurgaon Expressway, cutting travel time between Dwarka and Gurgaon by half.

Now, commuters from Dwarka and other parts of Delhi drive to Gurgaon on the Delhi-Gurgaon Expressway, built to slice travel time from the country's capital from more than 60 minutes to 20.

But that has not been the case. Long queues of vehicles extend on both sides of a toll plaza on the Delhi-Gurgaon border during peak hours. The tailbacks stretch for kilometers. More than 8,000 vehicles cross the Delhi-Gurgaon border every hour.

Gurgaon is a major satellite city of Delhi and is home to lakhs of people who work in the national capital. Gurgaon also hosts hundreds of MNC offices employing people living in Dwarka or the country's capital. For all these workers, time is money and they cannot afford to sit in snarls.

The eight-lane Delhi-Gurgaon Expressway will be 18km long and 75m wide.

They believe the Dwarka Expressway will end their daily struggle in bottlenecks, gridlocks and stop-and-crawl traffic on the Delhi-Gurgaon Expressway, not to mention the man-hours lost on the road annually.

"On most days I lose half-an hour at the toll plaza. I hope to reach office and home early when the new road opens," daily commuter Madhu Sharma said.

At 150m, the Dwarka Expressway will be one of the India's widest roads. The Delhi-Gurgaon Expressway is 75m wide.

Driving from the Dwarka Expressway to Terminal 3 of the Indira Gandhi International Airport and the Metro rail station in Dwarka's Sector-22 will take only a few minutes. The 18-hole golf course proposed in Dwarka by the Delhi

Development Authority to be within putting distance of the road.

There are two speed bumps in the way of the road's construction. But those are minor and won't stop traffic from flowing on the speedway at the end of the year, the developer claimed.

The speed bumps are in the nature of litigation. More than 14km of the road passes through land that is free of litigation. The rest four km sit on land under litigation in bits and pieces.

"Barely 26 acres are under litigation. There is a high court order to compensate the landowners with alternate plots and this is being done," an official associated with the project said.

The land under litigation is in New Palam Vihar and sectors 100, 102 and 103, among others.

Besides the Dwarka Expressway, commuters would also be travelling between Dwarka and Gurgaon by the Metro by 2016.

The proposed line, an extension of the Airport Express network, will connect Dwarka's Sector-21 with Iffco Chowk in Gurgaon.

Sector-21 and Iffco Chowk already have Metro services. Sector-21 is served by both the blue line and the Airport Express line. Iffco Chowk is served by the Jehangirpuri-HUDA City center line. But the Sector-21 and Iffco Chowk stations are not connected directly now.

The new service will cover the distance between Dwarka and Gurgaon in 14 minutes.

Commuting apart, the Dwarka Expressway, touching new residential colonies and a commercial corridor, has already begun fuelling a realty boom.