Expressway With Built-In Runway: IAF Plane Carrying PM Lands On UP’s Showpiece Highway; Check Details

New Delhi: An IAF C-130J Super Hercules carrying Prime Minister Narendra Modi landed today on the Purvanchal Expressway at Karwal Kheri in Uttar Pradesh’s Sultanpur.

The PM will inaugurate the 340-km expressway, a showpiece infrastructure project of the Yogi Adityanath government.

A 3.2-km stretch of the expressway in Sultanpur district has been built to serve as a runway for landings and takeoffs by IAF jets when needed. Today, Mirage-2000 and Su-30MKI fighter jets will land on and take off from this strip as part of its inauguration. A flypast is also planned.

The expressway starts in Lucknow and ends in eastern Uttar Pradesh’s Ghazipur. Along the way, it crosses nine districts of Uttar Pradesh — including Lucknow, Barabanki, Faizabad, Ambedkar Nagar, Amethi, Sultanpur, Azamgarh, Mau and Ghazipur, connecting important cities like Varanasi, Ayodhya, Gorakhpur and Allahabad.

It has been built at an estimated cost of Rs 22,500 crore.

The expressway is six-lane wide which can be expanded to eight lanes in future. The superhighway is set to boost the economic development of eastern UP.

“The Prime Minister had laid the foundation stone for this expressway in July 2018 and we are in a position today that the PM will inaugurate it. This is a prime example of how a ‘double engine’ government functions,” Adityanath had said earlier.