Recently, the Chief Minister of Assam, Himanta Biswa Sarma, shared that National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) has issued the Letter of Acceptance to the successful bidder for taking up work on the Guwahati ring road. He claimed that from the conceptualisation stage to its execution, this project is being driven at breakneck speed. Well, what was the speed of getting the final approval and awarding the work to a Gujarat-based company only NHAI can say, but Union Minister Nitin Gadkari had announced the ring road in Guwahati way back in October 2023.
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In 2024, the work of the project was expected to start before Lok Sabha elections, but it was postponed for various reasons. Land acquisition was one of the reasons, the bidding process was not complete, it took time to acquire approvals from various central government ministries concerned and several other technical reasons. A 55-kilometre Greenfield road from Kamalpur to Sonapur will be constructed and altogether 350 hectares of land will have to be acquired by the government to make the ring road, including the widening of the road from Basistha to Jorabat. So it took time but finally the project is approved and the construction is awarded. Only future will say how speedy the work will be.