The Bundelkhand Expressway will be inaugurated in the second week of June this year, Durgesh Upadhyay, media adviser to the Uttar Pradesh Expressway Development Authority, has told Swarajya.

The 296-kilometre-long expressway was proposed by Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath in April 2017, just months after he took office for the first time. Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid the foundation stone for the construction of the expressway in February 2020.

As its name suggests, the expressway passes through the districts in UP's part of Bundelkhand — Chitrakoot, Banda, Hamirpur, Mahoba, Jalaun and Auraiya.

The expressway takes off from Bharatkoop on National Highway 35, which is also called the Varanasi-Banda road, in the Chitrakoot district, and ends near Kudrail village in Etawah district on the Lucknow-Agra Expressway.

The expressway will link Chitrakoot with the Agra-Lucknow Expressway in Etawah, which in turn is linked to the National Capital Region (NCR) through the state's two operational expressways — 302-km Lucknow-Agra Expressway and the 165-km Yamuna Expressway.

For its construction, the expressway was divided into six packages. Two packages were awarded to Apco Infratech and Gawar Constructions Limited and one each to Ashoka Buildcon and Dilip Buildcon.

Apart from linking the backward Bundelkhand region in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh with the National Capital Region, the expressway is critical for the success of the UP Defence Corridor. Two of the six nodes of the defence corridor — Chitrakoot and Jhansi — lie in Bundelkhand.

The expressway will also help boost tourism in the region. Bundelkhand is flanked in the east and the west by the state's two most popular tourist circuits. To the east lies the Prayagraj-Sarnath-Varanasi triangle, and the Agra-Mathura-Fatehpur Sikri circuit lies to the west of the region. The new expressway will link Chitrakoot to Agra and NCR, allowing tourists to travel to the temple town much more easily than before.

"If someone can travel to Chitrakoot from Delhi in five and a half hours, why wouldn't he go there, spend time as a tourist and come back? If going to Chitrakoot from Delhi takes nine hours, then the person going there has to plan for three days — one day for going, one day for seeing the place and one day for the return journey. That, generally, people will not accept. That's why we have gone for expressways," Awanish Awasthi, the Chief Executive Officer of the Uttar Pradesh Expressways Industrial Development Authority, told Swarajya in 2020.