WionDrive News Desk 
New Delhi: Union Road Transport and Highways Minister, Nitin Gadkari, has taken to the microblogging site ‘X’ (formerly known as Twitter) to share a new video showcasing India’s first eight-lane elevated road, the Dwarka Expressway. This 29.6 km expressway, a project valued at INR 9000 crore, is anticipated to reach near-completion by April 2024. Nitin Gadkari previously highlighted that the expressway, spanning 34 meters in width, is being constructed with a single pillar over 18.9 km in Haryana and 10.1 km in Delhi.
In his recent ‘X’ post on Sunday, Gadkari hailed the Dwarka Expressway as a “Marvel of Engineering,” describing it as a futuristic journey into the realm of state-of-the-art infrastructure. The video release follows closely after Gadkari expressed concerns regarding the response to queries posed by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), which ignited a debate surrounding the construction costs of the Dwarka Expressway in Delhi.
Earlier this month, the CAG’s report spurred political controversies, highlighting the perceived high costs associated with the expressway’s construction. Ministry sources countered these claims by explaining that the CAG’s approach in computing the cost, dividing the total expenditure of INR 91,000 crore under the National Corridor Efficiency Programme by the project’s 5,000-kilometer length, did not accurately reflect the cost of components like flyovers and tunnels that were integral to the project’s scope.
The ministry emphasized that the cost of INR 91,000 crore for the 5,000 km span was established in August 2016 as part of the Bharatmala Phase-I project, and substantial savings were achieved by awarding contracts at a lower rate than the initial estimates. The average civil construction cost for the expressway’s four packages was noted to be 12 percent lower than the estimations.
The CAG’s observations that the decision to opt for an elevated carriageway in the Haryana segment of the Dwarka Expressway escalated the construction cost to INR 251 crore per kilometer from the initial INR 18.2 crore per km estimation sparked debates on the project’s cost-effectiveness. The audit report on the implementation of Phase-I of the ‘Bharatmala Pariyojana’ highway projects also fueled allegations of corruption in the awarding process.
