The NH8 experience: Stuck in jam, FM Arun Jaitley talks of more Delhi-Gurgaon roads at Happening Haryana summit

NEW DELHI: Having received a taste of the daily congestion on the Delhi-Gurgaon expressway, finance minister Arun Jaitley on Monday pressed for at least two new link roads between the capital and the "millennium" city.

The jams on NH 8 ensured Jaitley reached 20 minutes late for the inauguration of the " Happening Haryana" summit and his remarks underlined the obvious - and long-standing - deficiency in a road link used by lakhs of commuters daily. This is not the first time Jaitley has had to endure the clogging on the expressway but the investment summit was an appropriate setting to point out that the basics need fixing as the crawl to Gurgaon is often what foreign visitors experience first while travelling from the international airport to the city.

The minister said if alternate routes are not made operational quickly people may have to spend as much as a few hours to reach Gurgaon from the national capital as traffic increases over the next two to three years.

Recently minister for roads and highways Nitin Gadkari also went through a similar experience and directed the National Highway Authority of India to prepare a plan to de-congest travel to Gurgaon and Delhi's domestic and international airports.

Jaitley said the new routes needs to be fast-tracked since Gurgaon and development beyond the city is expected to attract increasing levels of investment as industrial development gathers pace. "Delhi is already saturated. There is no space in Delhi. The entire spill over will come to NCR and particularly to Gurgaon and beyond. I think it's high time a second and third route is immediately made operational," he said while asking urban development minister M Venkaiah Naidu and Haryana chief minister Manoharlal Khattar to consider solutions.

At present, the traffic between Gurgaon and Delhi flows on the NH-8 due to a concentration of industries and corporate offices along the expressway. But the carrying capacity of the road was breached before 2013 itself. The most recent daily traffic data, recorded in July 2013, shows how 3.3 lakh vehicles used the expressway every day against a capacity of two lakh.Though it has been close to 10 years since the Centre proposed building three alternate roads connecting Vasant Kunj with DLF-III, Andheria Mod with Gurgaon-Faridabad Road and Dwarka with Palam Vihar, not one is operational. "FM's stress on alternate roads may revive the projects," said an NHAI official.

Meanwhile, what may come as a partial relief, Khattar on Monday announced that the 54 km priority stretch of the Manesar-Palwal of the KMP expressway will be opened this month. Traffic towards Faridabad can take this road.