A 1.653-km-long tunnel breakthrough on the Kathmandu-Tarai expressway was achieved on Friday.

The final point of one of the ‘twin tube tunnels’ at the Dhedre tunnel site in Bakaiya Rural Municipality of Makawanpur was completed in the presence of Minister for Defense Hari Prasad Upreti, the Nepal Army said.

On May 17, a breakthrough of a 1.633-km-long twin tube tunnel at Lendanda was also achieved.

Of the total 3.355-kilometre-long Mahadevtar tunnel, the longest in the project, only 1.197 kilometres are left to be cleared, the army had said.

The Kathmandu-Tarai Expressway, or fast track, connects the capital city and Nijagadh in southern Nepal with a 76-km highway. Once completed, it will cut the current travel time by several hours. With 11 km in bridges and 6 km in tunnels, the expressway is more complex than any road construction project Nepal has undertaken before.

The Nepal government on May 4, 2017 formally handed over the project, under the Department of Roads, to the Nepal Army. The national force started building the multi-billion-rupee project in August of the same year with a four-year completion target.

However, in December of 2023, Nepal Army Chief Prabhu Ram Sharma, presenting a bleak picture of progress at a parliamentary committee meeting, said that the highway might not be ready even in three and a half years.

The project has been split into 13 packages, with the army yet to award contracts for the 6.5 km area at the Khokana-Bungamati area in Lalitpur, Makawanpur and Nijgadh, due to land acquisition at the entry point yet to be completed.

So far, the expressway has made overall progress of 33.99 percent.