In a major infrastructure boost to the Nuh region, the Haryana government approved a ₹400 crore budget to widen a 47-kilometre stretch on National Highway 248A along the Nuh to Alwar-Naugaon border from a single lane into a four-lane corridor.
The decision to widen the highway was taken in the Vidhan Sabha on Friday by public works and public health engineering minister Ranbir Gangwa. Officials said they are working on getting clearance from the forest department.
“The work will start within a month or two once all the process is completed,” said Gangwa, adding that people from Nuh have been protesting for long to get the highway widened.
Nuh is home to a large number of commercial drivers, mostly young men, who park their vehicles on the main Alwar-Gurugram Road, which frequently results in road accidents. At least 1,100 people have died on this stretch in more than 1,600 accidents in the last five years, according to the police. In 2017, locals labelled the stretch the “khooni highway” (killer highway) after more than 2,500 deaths were reported in a 10-year period. So locals had long sought the highway’s widening as a solution to the problem.
The campaign for widening was led by the Mewat RTI Manch and was supported by Mewat Sanyukt Sangharsh Samiti, a group of social organisations in Nuh and Firozepur Jhirka.
Mewat RTI Manch convenor Rajuddin Meo said that people from 32 villages across Nuh protested through human chains, village panchayat meetings, street plays, signature drives and memorial services to draw attention to the rising death toll on the single-lane highway.
In 2019, locals sent a 100-foot-long cloth with more than 20,000 signatures to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to draw his attention to the issue. The Haryana government then announced a project to widen the road with a budget of ₹186 crore, but it was delayed because resources were diverted to the construction of the Delhi-Mumbai-Vadodara Expressway.
Locals kept protesting, however, and sustained civic engagement by community leaders such as poet Mohammad Ilyas Pradhan, advocate Subodh Kumar Jain, and former sarpanch Mahmood Khan, finally moved the government to sanction the project.
“This is not just a road project—it’s a lifeline for Nuh,” said social worker Osman Durrani, who participated in the protests.
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