Hyderabad to have India’s longest highway tunnel road soon

Hyderabad will have the longest highway tunnel in the country stretching for about 10 km from Jubilee Hills Road 45 Junction to Banjara Hills Road 12 Junction.

The proposed four-lane tunnel will be dug using a tunnel boring machine (TBM) and will run from the KBR Park junction to the NFCL junction in Punjagutta.

Now that the state government has entrusted the project to the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC), the civil agency is conducting a feasibility study and preparing a detailed project report (DPR) by enlisting the help of international technical consultants.

The 9.20 km long Syama Prasad Mookerjee Tunnel connects Kashmir to the rest of India and is the longest in India. In Mumbai, a plan to dig a longer tunnel was never realized.

When the proposal was approved several years ago, the Center's government announced that the GHMC should not touch the trees within the park's first boundary wall that fall under the Eco-sensitive Zones (ESZ). The ESZ did not apply to the trees outside the second boundary wall.

The Center's government said a few years ago that the GHMC would not be allowed to touch the trees within the park's first boundary wall covered by the ESZ when it approved the proposal. The ESZ did not apply to the trees outside the second boundary wall.

In light of this, Municipal Minister KT Rama Rao ordered officials to investigate the possibility of an underground tunnel to prevent the felling of trees.

Strategic Road Development Plan (SRDP) is designed to achieve signal-free intersections, enabling faster movement between key destinations in the core city, GHMC officials said.

As part of the Strategic Road Development Plan (SRDP), several slope separators have been constructed, including the overpass on road 45, MindSpace Junction, Biodiversity Junction and the cable-stayed bridge at Durgam Cheruvu. Even the completion of the SRDP overpasses and cable-stayed bridge has not eased the daily traffic congestion at several intersections on these road links between Punjagutta and Banjara Hills Road No. 12.