Soon, those travelling from Nagpur will be able to reach Pune in 6 hours, via a new proposed expressway connecting Pune to the recently inaugurated Samruddhi Mahamarg.

On 11 November, Union Minister for Road Transport and Highways, Nitin Gadkari announced that the work on 268-km-long expressway between Pune and Aurangabad will start soon.

“Under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, we are building a highway from Aurangabad to Pune and soon its work will start, so that we can reach Pune from Nagpur in just 6 hours. We are also building 6 express highways in Maharashtra,” Gadkari said in Nagpur.

The existing route between the orange capital of India — Nagpur and Queen of Deccan — Pune, passes through many villages and is overloaded with local and industrial traffic. It almost takes 16 hours to reach Pune via the existing stretch.

Alignment

The access-controlled highway will start from the Pune-Bengaluru highway intersection with Pune’s proposed ring road and will connect to the Samruddhi Expressway at Aurangabad.

To be made at a cost of Rs 10,000 crore, the greenfield expressway between Pune and Aurangabad will reduce the travel time between the two cities to 1.15 hours from the current 4-5 hours.

The proposed alignment has a length of 268 km, which includes a ring road around Pune city covering 39 km, a 20 km spur (12 km to Ranjangaon and 8 km to Bidkin-Shendra).

Samruddhi Corridor

Prime Minister, Narendra Modi on 11 November inaugurated the first phase of the Mumbai-Nagpur Samruddhi Expressway.

The 701-km, six-lane access-controlled road will reduce the travel time between Nagpur and Mumbai from 16 hours to eight hours.

Touted as the longest operational expressway in the country, it has been officially named ‘Hindu Hrudaysamrat Balasaheb Thackeray Maharashtra Samruddhi Mahamarg’.

In the first phase of the project, the 520-km-long stretch between Nagpur and Shirdi, has been inaugurated.

The remaining 181-km stretch under Phase-2, between Shirdi and Mumbai, will end in Thane’s Vadpe area in the Bhiwandi district, and will be ready by 2024.

The expressway passes via Nagpur-Wardha-Amravati-Washim-Buldhana-Jalna-Aurangabad-Nashik-Ahmednagar-Thane.  

The Pune-Aurangabad expressway will pass through Pune, Ahmednagar, Beed and Aurangabad districts before joining the Samruddhi corridor in Aurangabad.

As part of infrastructure-led development, the state government has planned to connect all 36 districts of Maharashtra, over the next two decades, through 5,000 km of access control expressways.