Union minister Dr Jitendra Singh on Tuesday said that the Katra-Delhi express road corridor will be ready for operation by 2023, thereby reducing the road-travel time between Katra and Delhi to around six and half hours and six hours between Jammu and Delhi.
After a meeting with Union minister for road transport and highways Nitin Gadkari, Dr Jitendra Singh said the 575 kms long express road corridor will cost over Rs. 35,000 crore and will connect Katra to Delhi via Amritsar. It will also touch Jalandhar, Kapurthala, Ludhiana in Punjab alongwith Kathua and Jammu in J&K.
Dr Jitendra Singh, who is a Lok Sabha MP from Udhampur in Jammu division, has been pursuing this project since 2015 and about three and half years ago told the people in Katra that the proposal for the corridor has been accepted by Gadkari but it would take time to materialise because of procedural issues like survey, land acquisition, forest clearance etc.
According to Dr Jitendra Singh, the survey has been completed and the process of acquisition of land is nearly complete in Haryana and will now be taken up in Punjab followed by the Jammu and Kashmir segment of the corridor.
{{/usCountry}}According to Dr Jitendra Singh, the survey has been completed and the process of acquisition of land is nearly complete in Haryana and will now be taken up in Punjab followed by the Jammu and Kashmir segment of the corridor.
{{/usCountry}}The formal approval of the proposal has been obtained from Punjab. Jammu and Kashmir had approved it earlier.
Singh said after the completion of the corridor, people would prefer to travel between Jammu and Delhi by road instead of train or by air. The corridor has been planned to connect the two holy cities of Katra and Amritsar along with some other important religious shrines between the two destinations.