ISLAMABAD - The National Highway Authority (NHA) has failed to complete Hakla-Dera Ismail Khan Motorway besides missing a number of deadlines in the last three years.
According to the original schedule, a 293-kilometre long motorway was to be completed by the end of 2018 that was started in 2016.
However, after the general elections, the present government of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf put the project on backburner and resultantly it could not be completed so far besides announcing one after another deadlines.
The previous government of Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz had directed to award the said motorway to multiple contractors by dividing it into four packages to make it operational at earliest.
The five packages include 54.6km package-I from Yarik to Rahmani Khail, 71.2km package-II from Rahmani Khail to Kot Balian, 52.5km package-III from Kot Balian to Tarap, 51km package-IV from Tarap to Pindi Gheb and 63km package-V from Pindi Gheb to Hakla.
The package-I was awarded to National Logistic Cell (NLC), package II was further divided into four packages and awarded to Skb Engineering Construction, SMD Bloch, Khalid Rauf and Company respectively.
Package III was awarded to Frontier Works Organisation (FWO) while package IV and V was awarded to ZKB Private Limited.  
At present, the package I, II and III has been completed by the aforementioned contractors but package IV and V that is awarded to ZKB is still pending and work progress on it is 93 present.
When contacted, a project director Muhammad Azam informed that the work on a railway diversion at the junction of Hakla-DI Khan Motorway and N80 is underway and it is the last bottleneck in the project.
He said it is expected that the whole motorway would be ready for travelling in October 2021.   
The construction of Hakla-DI Khan Motorway project is part of the western alignment of CPEC and this four-lane north-south motorway starts from the Hakla on Peshawar-Islamabad Motorway (M-1), near Fateh Jang interchange and ends at Yarik near Dera Ismail Khan. 
The motorway once completed will reduce travel time between Dera Ismail Khan and Islamabad to two-and-a-half hours from the present five hours or more.  
The second part of the western corridor – Yarak-Zhob-Quetta – is 540km long and will bring down the distance from Islamabad to Quetta to only 830km and reduce travel time to eight hours. 
The motorway is not part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) though it is often wrongly included in it. The project was conceived by the previous government and same is financed by the Pakistan government and not China as part of CPEC. In 2016, the then prime minister had convened an all-parties’ conference on the demand and had announced this western corridor.