A portion of the Agra-Lucknow Expressway caved in

A portion of the Agra-Lucknow Expressway, former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Akhilesh Yadav’s dream project, caved in on Wednesday causing a vehicle carrying four passengers to fall into a 20-feet ditch in Dauki, 16 kilometres from Agra, media reports said. Heavy rain had caused a portion of the road to cave in. All four passengers were rescued by locals and no major injury was reported.

According to NDTV, the four men were on a road trip from Mumbai to their home in Kannauj district after one of the men bought the car in Mumbai. The Uttar Pradesh government has called for a probe asking a third party agency, RITES Ltd, to find out why the road caved in and submit a report within 15 days.

“A third-party probe has been ordered into the caving-in of the side road of the expressway (16 km from Agra towards Lucknow) by RITES Limited. The construction of the damaged road will be done by the construction agency at its cost,” Uttar Pradesh Expressway Industrial Development Authority (UPEIDA) chairman Avanish Awasthi said.

The driver had bought the second-hand vehicle in Mumbai recently and had no idea of the route on which they were travelling, The Times of India reported.

The 302-kilometre-long Agra-Lucknow expressway, which costs nearly Rs 15,000 crore, was completed in record time of 23 months. It was inaugurated in November 2016, by the erstwhile Samajwadi Party (SP) government months ahead of the 2017 Uttar Pradesh Assembly election. It is the country’s longest access-controlled greenfield expressway on which the Indian Air Force (IAF) fighters jets can land and take-off in case of a war-like emergency.