Central road making agency, National Highways Authority of India, (NHAI) has created a Guinness World Record for the longest continuously laid bituminous lane of 75 kilometres in 105 hours and 33 minutes on the national highway between Amravati and Akola districts in Maharashtra.

Mentioning about the record, Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari on Wednesday said the project was implemented by 720 workers including a team of independent consultants who worked day and night.

The total length of the 75 kilometres of single lane continuous bituminous concrete road is equivalent to 37.5 kilometres of two-lane paved shoulder road and the work started on June 3, at 7:27 am and was completed on June 7, at 5 pm, the minister said in a message. This is the third kind of world record by MoRTH in last one year pertaining to road and highways constructions.

The previous Guinness World Record for the longest continuously laid bituminous was for building 25.275 kilometres of road that was achieved in Doha, Qatar in February 2019 and that task was completed in 10 days.

The Amravati to Akola section is part of NH 53 and this is an important east-east corridor which connects major cities like Kolkata, Raipur, Nagpur and Surat.

According to Gadkari, once completed, this stretch will play a major role in easing movement of traffic and freight on this route. He also congratulated all the engineers, contractors, consultants, workers from NHAI and Raj Path Infracon Pvt Ltd for efficient implementation of the project that has helped in successful completion of this world record.

Last year also the NHAI achieved a rare feat by completing a single lane of the four-lane stretch of 25.54 km being developed between Vijaypur-Solapur (NH 52) in a record time of 18 hours which was added in the Limca Book of Records.  This road was part of the high density traffic corridor Bengaluru-Chitradurga-Vijayapura-Solapur-Aurangabad-Dhule-lndore-Gwalior.

Before this a new World Record was created for the laying of pavement quality concrete (PQC) for a four-lane highway of 2,580 meters length within 24 hours. It was achieved in India during the construction of the country’s flagship greenfield expressway, the Delhi-Vadodara-Mumbai project.