Jaipur, Apr 26 (PTI) Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot on Tuesday wrote a letter to Union highway minister Nitin Gadkari, seeking better road connectivity to Bharatpur which houses a popular bird sanctuary.

Besides demanding an extension of the road connecting Paniyala Mod and Delhi-Mumbai Expressway up to Bharatpur, Gehlot asked the highway ministry to declare the 97-kilometre Alwar-Bharatpur road as a national highway and make it a four-lane stretch.

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The chief minister said Alwar district is a leading industrial and tourist destination and Bharatpur too has a world-famous bird sanctuary.

Also, the Taj Mahal at Agra in Uttar Pradesh and a number of tourist sites at Mathura, Goverdhan and Vrindavan are in close proximity to Bharatpur which hosts thousands of visitors every day from Punjab, Haryana and other states.

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According to a statement, Gehlot said that the Delhi-Mumbai greenfield expressway and the newly-built Ambala-Narnaul-Paniyala Mod National Highway in Rajasthan are being connected by the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) through Paniyala Mod-Alwar-Badodameo.

The chief minister in his letter said that in the future the traffic coming from the Delhi-Mumbai Expressway and Ambala-Narnaul-Paniyala Expressway would need an easy and accessible route to reach Bharatpur, Agra and Mathura.

The road from Paniyala Mod to Delhi-Mumbai Expressway should be extended up to Bharatpur, he said, adding that Alwar-Bharatpur road should also be declared as a national highway and it is necessary to upgrade it to four lane.

This will boost development and tourism in this area and also provide employment opportunities to the general public, he said.

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)