The Union road transport and highways ministry on Wednesday approved building over 1,000 km of expressways under its flagship Rs 16,000-crore road building programme, National Highway Development Programme. This includes the 400-km stretch of Vadodara-Mumbai. NHAI officials say the 400-km expressway will be further connected to the Ahmedabad-Vadodara expressway which is already operational. Effectively, a non-stop drive will bring the travel time between Ahmedabad and Mumbai down to five hours. Similarly, it will take just about four hours to cut the distance between Vadodara and Mumbai. The Vadodara-Mumbai expressway will follow the same alignment fixed by the Gujarat government in 1992. A 600-metre wide corridor has been set aside for the road project. The expressway is likely to be built by 2015 linking Ahmedabad with Dahisar, which is on the outskirts of Mumbai, enabling travellers to bypass Vadodara and Surat. The greenfield project between Vadodara and Dahisar, about 380 km away from each other, will come up on ‘design, build, finance and operate’ model. Officials say the Vadodara-Mumbai section which will cost Rs 7,500 crore is top priority. Between Vadodara and Surat, the speedway will be six lanes. It will be eight lanes between Surat and Dahisar.
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