ISLAMABAD   -  After missing a number of deadlines, the Hakla-D.I. Khan Motorway is now going to be made operational in the middle of next month and most probably Prime Minister Imran Khan would inaugurate the project on October 25.  

Arbab Ali Dhakan, member engineering National Highway Authority (NHA), has confirmed that remaining work on the motorway would be completed before October 15 2021 and then motorway would be formally opened for the commuters.   

According to the original schedule, the 293km-long motorway, started in 2016, was to be completed by the end of 2018. 

However, after the general elections, the present government of Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf put the project on backburner and resultantly it could not be completed on time besides announcing one after another deadline. 

It is pertinent to mention here that the previous government of Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) directed to award motorway project to multiple contractors by dividing it into four packages to make it operational as earliest. 

The five packages include 54.6km-long package-I from Yarik to Rahmani Khail, 71.2km-long package-II from Rahmani Khail to Kot Balian, 52.5km-long package-III from Kot Balian to Tarap, 51km-long package-IV from Tarap to Pindi Gheb and 63km-long 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 97 percent. 

The work on a railway diversion at the junction of Hakla-D.I. Khan Motorway and N80 is underway and it is the last bottleneck in the project. 

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 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 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.