17th Sept 2023 Source by https://www.moneycontrol.com/
The ministry is focussed on making the highways environment friendly and is using waste plastics and looking at ways to use municipal wastes in construction.
The 1,386-km-long Delhi-Mumbai Expressway, being developed at an estimated cost of over Rs 1 lakh crore, will be ready by December, reducing the time taken to travel between the two cities to 12 hours, Union Minister for Road Transport and Highways Nitin Gadkari said in an exclusive interaction with Moneycontrol. "We have completed the construction of the Delhi-Mumbai Expressway up to Vadodara till now and soon the Prime Minister will open another section on this highway which goes till Ratlam," he said.
He added that the Delhi-Mumbai expressway had been completed up to Surat and the tendering process for construction beyond Surat had been divided into 12 packages.
"Six packages out of the 12 packages have been awarded till now and work has started on the Solapur package. There were some environmental problems from Surat to Nashik. Now that has also been dissolved," Gadkari said.
The minister also said that he was confident that around 70-80 percent of the work to reduce the distance between Delhi and Chennai by 320 km will also be completed by the end of the year.
