ISLAMABAD - A much-awaited inauguration of Hakla-D I Khan Motorway is once again delayed for few weeks due to non-availability of Prime Minister Imran Khan. Earlier, it was proposed by National Highway Authority (NHA) that the motorway would be formally inaugurates by the Prime Minister on Monday (Today).
However, according to reliable sources, it has been postponed due to non-availability of the Prime Minister. A senior officer of the NHA said that the motorway is fully operational at the moment as its construction work has been completed. He said the motorway is open for public but its formal inauguration has yet to be made by the Prime Minister.
He said as the Prime Minister performed ground-breaking of another Balkasar to Muzaffrgarh Road of NHA on Saturday and he is also engaged in some other commitments, now the inauguration of Hakla-D I Khan Motorway would be held after few weeks.
According to the original schedule, the 293km 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 Tahreek-e-Insaf put the project on backburner and resultantly it could not be completed on time besides announcing one after another deadline.
The construction of Hakla-D I 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 Yarak near Dera Ismail Khan.
The motorway has reduced travel time between Dera Ismail Khan and Islamabad to two-and-a-half hours from 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 CPEC though it is often wrongly included in it. The project was conceived by the previous government and 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.