NH-44 Panipat: Widening Work and Smart Traffic Surveillance Underway

Panipat's stretch of NH-44, the Grand Trunk Road connecting Delhi to Amritsar, is undergoing a fresh round of infrastructure upgrades aimed at easing chronic traffic bottlenecks around the city's 10-km elevated expressway. The Panipat Elevated Corridor, built in 2008 as a six-lane access-controlled bypass, was designed to keep highway traffic moving above the city, but congestion at ground level near the elevated stretch has persisted for years.

The National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) has now approved widening of the peripheral service roads running on both sides of the elevated highway within Panipat city limits. According to district officials, the project involves widening these service lanes from 3.5 metres to 5.5 metres, on a budget of roughly Rs 14 crore. The Deputy Commissioner's office has stated that the objective is to decongest the traffic flow on the NH-44 in the city and to provide better facilities to the residents. NHAI's Project Director for the Ambala region confirmed that official formalities were complete and ground work would begin shortly after clearance from GRAP restrictions.

Alongside the physical widening, the Panipat district administration and traffic police are pushing ahead with a long-planned CCTV surveillance rollout to make NH-44 a model road. Police teams had earlier identified over 100 sensitive points across the city for camera installation, and the current plan covers the entire elevated highway zone from the toll plaza to Sewah village. These automatic number-plate-reading cameras are intended to catch speeding, red-light jumping, and wrong-lane driving, with challans issued automatically, according to the traffic DSP overseeing the project.

This local widening initiative builds on the much larger Delhi-Panipat NH-44 upgrade completed in recent years, an 8-lane elevated expressway stretch built by NHAI, which addressed intercity travel speeds along the corridor. However, this project focused on regional connectivity, not the localized congestion inside Panipat town, which is where the current peripheral road and CCTV works come in. Separately, NHAI has previously opened new entry and exit cuts on the elevated stretch, near Malik fuel station and Khadi Ashram Chowk, to give residents more direct access points without diverting through congested chowks like Sanjay Chowk and Red Light Chowk.

For homebuyers and investors tracking Panipat's real estate momentum, these improvements matter directly. Sector 36 and Sector 37, where M3M and other developers have launched residential plots, apartments, and mixed-use projects, sit close to the NH-44 corridor and stand to benefit from smoother last-mile connectivity once the peripheral widening and smart-traffic systems are operational. Reduced congestion around the elevated highway typically translates into shorter commute times to Delhi, Karnal, and Sonepat, and better access for daily errands, both of which are recurring priorities for buyers evaluating townships along this stretch.

While timelines for on-ground completion depend on NHAI's execution pace, the combination of physical road widening and automated traffic enforcement signals a broader push by Haryana authorities to fix Panipat's most persistent infrastructure complaint. Buyers considering projects along Sector 36-37 should track construction milestones on the peripheral road works, as completion will directly affect access routes into these upcoming residential pockets.