Dwarka Expressway’s Delhi section opened on 17 August 2025, more than a year after the Haryana portion had been inaugurated. The 10.1-km addition joined the capital to the roughly 19-km section across the border, completing the principal link between Delhi’s Shiv Murti area and Gurugram. The official opening cost for the Delhi section was about ₹5,360 crore. [1] [2]
Its purpose was familiar to commuters: another route beside the heavily used NH-48, with connections towards the airport and western Delhi. The design separates through traffic from local roads, using elevated carriageways, interchanges and tunnels. Those structures also became the subject of a national audit dispute. [2] [4]
A long approach to completion
The scheme’s history preceded its national-highway contracts. Reporting by The Indian Express traced Haryana’s Northern Peripheral Road proposal to 2007 and NHAI’s assumption of the project to 2016. Land acquisition, compensation disputes and permission to remove trees obstructed construction in different places. Residents who had bought homes beside the proposed road lived for years with incomplete connections. [3]
The timetable continued to move. In May 2023, Nitin Gadkari said the expressway would be almost complete by April 2024. NHAI’s subsequent annual report recorded the March 2024 Haryana opening and a March 2025 target for the remaining sections. Delhi’s inauguration followed in August. [6] [2] [1]
The wider ₹11,000 crore announcement at that ceremony included Urban Extension Road-II. It was not the cost of Dwarka Expressway alone. [1]
What the audit questioned
The CAG’s 2023 Bharatmala audit questioned the choice to elevate the Haryana main carriageway when sufficient right of way was available for an at-grade road. It reported sanctioned civil construction cost of ₹250.77 crore per route-kilometre against a programme benchmark of ₹18.20 crore. [4]
That comparison highlighted design and approval questions. It was not, by itself, evidence that the same road had overshot an original ₹18.20-crore-per-kilometre contract fourteenfold, or a judicial finding of corruption.
The ministry defended the design in Parliament that December. It described an eight-lane elevated road with six service lanes, a tunnel and complex interchanges. Using awarded civil cost of ₹5,269 crore over 563 lane-kilometres, it calculated ₹9.35 crore per lane-kilometre and argued that costs were comparable. [5]
The two accounts use different cost stages and denominators. The ministry’s lane-based calculation does not erase the audit’s question about whether the chosen structures were necessary; the route-based benchmark does not make unlike designs identical. [4] [5]
The route after the debate
The opening records establish delivery of both principal sections. They do not supply a representative before-and-after estimate of congestion or a guaranteed time saving for every commuter. [1] [2]
For the neighbourhoods along the alignment, the long-promised connection had become a road they could use. Its construction history remains part of that achievement, including the years of delay and the public argument over what it should have cost. [3] [1]