5.5.15

Lucknow-Agra Expressway snippets

The ambitious Lucknow-Agra Expressway , set to be India's longest, may now be turned into an eight-lane super highway all along. UP government is all set to get the structures like bridges and underpasses in the expressway widened from six to eight lanes to give the much needed continuity to the top priority project.
Initially , the width of the structures in the expressway was fixed at six lanes while the roads were made expandable up to eight lanes. This would have led to a funnel-like situation for high-speed vehicles which would zoom past at 120 km per hour on the 302-km stretch.
Aware of the lapse, UP government has now gone into an overdrive to take the requisite corrective mea sure. Well-placed sources in the state government said soon a cabinet note would be sent to the chief minister office for getting the structures widened.
UP Expressway Industrial Development Authority chief executive officer, Navneet Sehgal, confirmed that the structures would be widened through a cabinet decision. “While the road can be widened, structures would be fixed. They can't be widened once constructed,“ he said. Therefore, corrective measures are being taken beforehand.
Sources in government said construction of structures has already started in parts of the expressway that seeks to reduce travel time between Lucknow and Agra by almost half. At least a dozen bridges and nearly 100 under passes are proposed to be constructed as part of the expressway estimated at a cost of around Rs.15,000 crore.
Two bridges to connect this expressway to the Yamuna expressway are also proposed be built at a cost of Rs.244.52 crore. First bridge will be built on river Yamuna under the Agra inner ring road project near village Mahal Badshah at a cost of Rs.98.32 crore, while the other bridge would come up at Delhi-Agra-Kanpur NH2 under Fatehabad at a cost of 146.2 crore.
Sehgal said the authority is constantly monitoring the work started in parts of the expressway scheduled to be completed by 2016-end, months before UP goes to assembly elections.


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