🛣️ How Uttar Pradesh Is Building India's Largest Network Of Expressways

👌 ‘Expressway Pradesh’

UP may be a laggard on social indicators like health and nutrition, but the glistening, new blacktop expressways that are coming up, crisscrossing the entire state, have been the talk of the town.

• At present, the fourth-largest state in the country has an operational network of six expressways, totalling 1,225 km of length.

• Another 2,600 km of expressways are being built, making UP the first state to have a network of 14 expressways.

Expressways grow. When the Yogi Adityanath government came to power in 2017, UP had only three functional expressways.

• They were the Noida-Greater Noida Expressway (25 km), the Yamuna Expressway from Greater Noida to Agra (165 km), and the Agra-Lucknow Expressway (302 km), connecting the Taj Mahal city to the state capital.

• Since then, three new expressways running across its entire length have been operationalised.

• These are the Delhi-Meerut Expressway, the Purvanchal Expressway from Lucknow to Ghazipur, and the 296-km-long Bundelkhand Expressway, inaugurated on 16 July 2022.

Pace picks up. Eight more expressways, totalling 2,600 km, are under construction or in the advanced implementation stage in UP.

• This includes the state’s longest, Ganga Expressway from Meerut to Prayagraj (594 km), whose foundation stone was laid by the Prime Minister in December 2021.

• The others are Gorakhpur Link Expressway, Lucknow-Kanpur Expressway, Ghaziabad-Kanpur Expressway, Delhi-Dehradun Economic Corridor, Gorakhpur-Siliguri Expressway, Ghazipur-Ballia-Manjhi Ghat Expressway, and Varanasi-Kolkata Expressway.

Linking expressways. A game-changing endeavour is the plan to link various regions in the state with the existing network of expressways through a link expressway.

• The state budget for FY 2023-24 has set aside Rs 235 crore for the two expressways — Jhansi Link Expressway and Chitrakoot Link Expressway.

• The two expressways will link the towns they originate from — Jhansi and Chitrakoot Dham — with the Bundelkhand Expressway.

• Linking the expressways will bring the remotest and most backward regions closer to not only the state capital Lucknow, but also Delhi and beyond, opening up markets and providing an impetus to socio-economic development in the region.

• The Centre is also working on many greenfield projects to further expand the expressway network of UP.

• The various planned expressways in UP are depicted in a graphic in the original Swarajya article, along with other graphical representations.

Bottom line: Uttar Pradesh, once notorious for its decrepit road infrastructure, has scripted a silent transformation with its expressways. Hence, the sobriquet ‘Expressway Pradesh’.