Come October, the drive from Mohali’s IT City to Ambala will be 30 minutes shorter, according to the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) officials.
The 30-km Ambala-IT City stretch of the Ambala-Chandigarh Greenfield Corridor — currently 89 per cent built — has neared its revised completion date.
A little earlier, by September, commuters on the Mohali-Sirhind run will get their own 30-minute reprieve, with that 27.37-km corridor now 91 per cent complete.
One relief has already arrived. The IT City-Kurali section has been thrown open to traffic, and motorists travelling that stretch are already saving 45 minutes that would otherwise have gone into navigating Kharar and the choked Mohali Airport Road.
The biggest single prize, however, remains out of reach for now.
The 106.92-km Sirhind-Sehna extension — still awaiting Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) clearance — promises to cut a full 90 minutes off the Mohali/Chandigarh-Bathinda run once approved, officials said, calling it the single largest time-saving leg of the entire ring.
The most significant development recently is administrative rather than visible on the ground — but it changes everything for two of the network’s most delayed links.
The NHAI has issued letters of award (LOA) for both the Rs 1,878.31-crore Zirakpur-Panchkula bypass and the Rs 1,463.95-crore greenfield spur connecting the Ambala-Chandigarh Expressway to that bypass, clearing the way for the construction.
Once built, the Zirakpur-Panchkula bypass is expected to cut 30 to 40 minutes off a route that today forces commuters through a daily crawl on NH-5 and the Airport Road. The spur, running 10.3 km near Rajo Majra village, will not save minutes on an existing route so much as create one that did not exist before — a direct, signal-free corridor giving Ambala, Delhi and Chandigarh traffic a straight shot to Zirakpur, Panchkula, and onward to Baddi and Shimla.
“In Punjab, we have approved Rs 1,463.95 crore for the construction of a six-lane, access-controlled greenfield spur linking the Ambala-Chandigarh section of NH-205A with the Zirakpur bypass,” Union Minister for Road Transport and Highways Nitin Gadkari had said.
“As part of the Tricity Ring Road project, the corridor will decongest key urban junctions across Mohali, Chandigarh and Panchkula by diverting through-traffic,” he had said while clearing the spur, adding that it would “enable faster, seamless connectivity towards Himachal Pradesh, particularly the Shimla region”.
The Pinjore bypass has already been completed and is operational, easing pressure on one of the more congested approaches to Panchkula.
The 20.3-km Pinjore-Baddi-Nalagarh stretch on NH-105 has been re-sanctioned and is currently out for bidding, while a 12-km state road link remains the network’s slowest piece, still stuck at the DPR and feasibility stage.
Stitch the numbers together and the picture sharpens: by the time the ring road is fully threaded into place, the Tricity’s most punishing daily commutes will be anywhere between half an hour and an hour and a half shorter on individual stretches.
For a vehicle travelling the complete 244-km loop, the cumulative saving works out to nearly four hours.
NHAI officials said the cost escalation on the spur — its estimate climbed from ?940 crore in 2023 to Rs 1,463.95 crore now, a jump of ?524 crore or 55.7 per cent — was the price of delay, but argued it was unavoidable given the spur’s role as the only access-controlled link tying the Ambala-Chandigarh Expressway to the Zirakpur bypass. “Once functional, the ring road will redirect thousands of vehicles daily away from Chandigarh’s internal grid,” an NHAI project head said.
