ADB to provide Rs100m loan to acquire land for new ring road

Rawalpindi commissioner asks NesPak to finalise design of 38-kilometres-long ring road from Rawat to Thalian

RAWALPINDI: The Asian Development Bank has said that it was ready to provide a loan to the Punjab government to procure land for a new ring road in Rawalpindi, linking the GT Road from Rawat with Motorway in Thalian.

This was disclosed in a meeting between representatives of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) on Monday in meeting with the Rawalpindi Commissioner Azmat Saeed and the Rawalpindi Development Authority (RDA). The officials said that they would provide around Rs100 million for acquiring the land as soon as design work for the project was completed.



The meeting was chaired by the commissioner and was attended by NesPak General Manager Danish Raza, RDA Chief Engineer Syed Akhtar Bukhari, and three representatives of ADB besides other relevant officials on Monday at commissioner’s office.

The commissioner asked NesPak, the consultant hired by RDA to finalise the design of the 38-kilometers-long ring road from Channi Alam Sher in Rawat to Thalian on the Motorway as soon as possible.

The road project, first conceived in 1992, would provide a 300-feet-wide dual carriageway for traffic between Peshawar and Lahore on the GT Road.

Each lane of the road would be 3.6 metres wide and is expected to help ease traffic congestion on all roads in the twin cities of Rawalpindi and Islamabad.

The road would also provide a fast and easy route to people living around the new Islamabad Airport in Fateh Jang. The project is expected to cost around Rs31 billion. The government would need to acquire around 9,894 kanals of land for the project.



The project would take around two years to complete. It would include five interchanges, a 12 kilometer-long new link road from Rawat junction to GT Road through DHA while converting a 6.5 kilometer-long link road from Fateh Jang to Rawat into a dual track carriageway.

NesPak is expected to complete its paperwork and submit a complete design plan in May. The project would be completed on private-public partnership basis on a build-operate-transfer method.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 28^th, 2017.