296-km long Bundelkhand Expressway operational on Saturday—prime minister Narendra Modi is due to inaugurate it—the Yogi Adityanath-led Uttar Pradesh is fast becoming a state of Highways and Expressways.
The Bundelkhand Expressway links seven districts in UP’s part of Bundelkhand with the Lucknow Agra expressway and to the National Capital Region (NCR).
This is Uttar Pradesh’s sixth operational expressway. It’s the only state in the country to have 13 expressways. Six are already operational—some 32,00 km of smooth traffic—while work is underway on seven.
UP’s Operational Expressways
1. Yamuna (Agra-Noida) Expressway — 165 km
2. Noida-Greater Noida Expressway — 25 km
3. Agra-Lucknow Expressway — 302 km
4. Delhi-Meerut Expressway — 96 km
5. Purvanchal Expressway — 341 km
6. Bundelkhand Expressway — 296 km
Total length = 1,225 km
UP’s Under-Construction Expressways
1. Gorakhpur Link Expressway — 91 km
2. Ganga Expressway — 594 km
3. Lucknow-Kanpur Expressway — 63 km
4. Ghaziabad-Kanpur Expressway — 380 km
5. Gorakhpur-Siliguri Expressway — 519 km
6. Delhi-Saharanpur-Dehradun Expressway — 210 km
7. Ghazipur-Ballia-Manjhi Ghat Expressway — 117 km
Total length = 1,974 km
When the Yogi Adityanath led government came to power in Uttar Pradesh, only two major expressways were functional: Yamuna Expressway and the Agra-Lucknow expressway.
The 165 km Noida-Agra six-lane access controlled expressway was built under the Public Private Partnership (PPP) mode by the Bahujan Samaj Party government and has been in operation since August 2012. It was proposed under the Rajnath Singh-led Bharatiya Janata Party government in 2002.
The work of linking this expressway with the state capital through another high speed 6-lane corridor, called the Agra-Lucknow Expressway, was started by the Samajwadi Party government and been successfully completed. The 302 km long expressway was operationalised in 2017, ahead of the assembly elections in the state.
