Expressways of Nepal: Kathmandu-Terai Fast Track and Planned Routes

An expressway is a fully access-controlled highway: vehicles enter and exit only at designated interchanges, roadside settlements and slow local traffic are kept off the carriageway, and the alignment is engineered for sustained high speeds. Nepal's existing national highways - including the Prithvi, Tribhuvan, Siddhartha and East-West (Mahendra) highways - are conventional mixed-traffic roads, so the country has never yet operated a true expressway. That will change with the Kathmandu-Terai/Madhesh Fast Track, designated National Highway 33 (NH33), which is being built to expressway standards with interchanges, toll plazas and a design speed of up to 120 km/h on its Terai section.

This hub tracks every access-controlled expressway project in Nepal: the under-construction Kathmandu-Terai Fast Track in detail, the planned Butwal-Pokhara and Kathmandu-Pokhara expressways, and the related tunnel and four-laning projects that will feed traffic into them. Figures are drawn from the Nepal Army's project office, the Department of Roads, the National Planning Commission and reporting by major Nepali dailies, with dates given in both AD and Bikram Sambat (BS) where relevant.

The Kathmandu-Terai/Madhesh Fast Track (Kathmandu-Tarai Drutmarg) runs 70.977 km from Khokana in Lalitpur, on the southern rim of the Kathmandu Valley, to Nijgadh in Bara district on the Terai plain, cutting through the Mahabharat hills of Makwanpur broadly along the Bagmati River corridor. Of the total length, about 48 km is surface road, roughly 12.9 km runs over bridges and nearly 11 km passes through tunnels - meaning close to a third of the expressway sits on engineered structures. Three interchanges are planned, at Khokana, Budune in Makwanpur and Nijgadh in Bara, each paired with a toll plaza.

The expressway is designed as a four-lane, access-controlled road within a right of way of about 50 metres, with a design speed of 120 km/h on the plains and lower speeds through the hill and tunnel sections. Once open, the Kathmandu-Nijgadh drive is projected to take about an hour, against the existing route of roughly 264 km via Naubise, Mugling and Narayangadh - a saving of about 193 km and more than four hours. Because Nijgadh lies close to Pathlaiya on the East-West Highway and the Birgunj-Raxaul border corridor, Nepal's busiest trade gateway, the Fast Track will also become the shortest freight route between Kathmandu and India.

The Fast Track's structures are its defining engineering feature. Seven tunnels with a combined length of about 10.9 km are being driven through the Mahabharat range, most of them twin-tube so that each direction of traffic has its own bore. By May 2026 (Jestha 2083 BS), breakthroughs had been achieved in both tubes of the Dhedre and Lendanda tunnels in Makwanpur and finishing work was under way, while excavation continued at Chandram Bhir, Devichaur and Sisautar and portal construction had begun at Mauri Bhir.

The alignment also requires 89 bridges with a combined length of about 12.9 km, including long viaducts through the Bagmati gorge. As of May 2026, foundations had been completed for 56 bridges, substructures for 38 and superstructures for 16, while four bridges in the disputed Khokana section had not started. Chinese contractors, including China State Construction Engineering and Poly Changda, are executing the most complex tunnel and bridge packages under the Nepal Army's management, with Korean firms - Yooshin Engineering, Pyunghwa Engineering and Korea Expressway Corporation - engaged for detailed design and supervision consultancy.

The idea of a direct Kathmandu-Terai link dates back decades, but the modern project took shape when the Asian Development Bank financed a feasibility study in 2008 and the Nepal Army opened a rough track along the alignment between 2008 and 2011. After attempts to build the road with an Indian developer under a build-operate-transfer model fell through, the government formally handed the project to the Nepal Army on 4 May 2017 (Baisakh 2074 BS) - the largest development project ever entrusted to the institution. The army's Kathmandu-Terai/Madhesh Fast Track Road Project office manages design, procurement and construction through 13 contract packages, of which 12 are under construction; the Khokana package has yet to be awarded.

The detailed project report (DPR) prepared by Korean consultants and approved in August 2019 (Bhadra 2076 BS) priced the expressway at about Rs 175 billion. A revised DPR approved by the cabinet in August 2023 (Bhadra 2080 BS) raised the estimate to Rs 211.93 billion including value-added tax and pushed the deadline to mid-April 2027. The project is financed entirely by the Government of Nepal through annual budget appropriations, with no foreign loans - unusual for infrastructure of this scale in Nepal. By early 2026, more than Rs 80 billion had been spent, with financial progress tracking slightly ahead of physical progress.

The completion date has moved repeatedly. When the army took over in 2017 the initial target was 2021; the 2019 DPR set mid-December 2024; and the August 2023 revision fixed the current official deadline of mid-April 2027, around the start of Baisakh 2084 BS. As of May 2026, overall physical progress stood at about 48 percent, and National Planning Commission and project officials had publicly acknowledged that the deadline will likely need to be extended by another two to three years - putting realistic end-to-end completion around 2029-2030, chiefly because of the unresolved Khokana section.

Progress is uneven across packages: some hill packages in Makwanpur have crossed 60 percent while the Khokana package has no contractor at all. Road surfacing has only just begun - by May 2026 sub-base had been laid on 11.2 km, base course on 5.5 km and blacktopping on a first 200-metre stretch. Because tunnels and long bridges are the longest-lead items, their pace will determine the opening date; the army maintains that sections outside Khokana can be substantially finished close to the official deadline, while independent reviewers expect full operation no earlier than 2029.

Search interest in the 'Nijgadh expressway' reflects the road's southern terminus at Nijgadh in Bara district, where the Fast Track will meet the East-West Highway network near Pathlaiya and funnel traffic toward the Birgunj border point and its dry port. Nijgadh was chosen partly because it is the proposed site of Nepal's second international airport; that airport has been stalled since a May 2022 (Jestha 2079 BS) Supreme Court verdict against the project in its existing form, but the expressway is proceeding independently and remains valuable as a trade and passenger corridor regardless of the airport's fate.

At the northern end, a 6.5-km stretch through Khokana and Bungamati in Lalitpur - contract package 11 - remains the project's hardest problem. Residents of these historic Newar settlements have contested land acquisition, compensation rates and the route's impact on cultural and agricultural land since the project began, and no contract has been awarded for the section. In February 2026 (Falgun 2082 BS), Prime Minister Sushila Karki directed officials to set the dispute aside and amend the DPR by shifting the planned toll plaza about 3.3 km to Pharsidol and building a bridge linking Dukuchhap; a final cabinet decision was still pending as of mid-2026, leaving the expressway's Kathmandu Valley entry unresolved.

Beyond the Fast Track, Nepal's next expressways exist mostly on paper. On 19 June 2026 (Asar 2083 BS), infrastructure minister Sunil Lamsal announced that the government would advance the study process for a Kathmandu-Pokhara expressway, part of a stated goal of cutting travel time between Kathmandu, Pokhara and Butwal to around two hours. Today the roughly 200 km Prithvi Highway drive between Kathmandu and Pokhara takes five hours or more, so a direct access-controlled alignment would be transformative - but the project has no fixed route, cost estimate or financing plan yet.

The Butwal-Pokhara expressway is a step further along. The fiscal year 2026/27 (2083/84 BS) federal budget, presented by finance minister Swarnim Wagle, announced upgrading the Butwal-Pokhara corridor of the Siddhartha Highway to expressway standard, and the government has said the tender process will begin in the coming fiscal year. Earlier, in October 2025, the interim government floated developing the wider Pokhara-Bhairahawa corridor as a 'game-changer' project; the Department of Roads has reportedly prepared a DPR and environmental study for a roughly 158 km Pokhara-Bhairahawa alignment, with indicative costs from about Rs 120 billion for a basic expressway to around Rs 180 billion for a tunnel-heavy option. All of these remain pre-construction proposals, and the Fast Track's own history shows how long the road from announcement to opening can be.

Several projects that are not expressways in the strict sense will still reshape the same corridors. The Nagdhunga-Sisnekhola tunnel, Nepal's first road tunnel, bypasses the congested Nagdhunga pass on Kathmandu's western exit with a 2.69 km main tube and a parallel 2.56 km evacuation tunnel. Built by Japan's Hazama Ando Corporation under a roughly Rs 22 billion project - including a Rs 16 billion concessional loan from the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) - it was declared complete at the end of June 2026 after 79 months of construction, with opening expected within weeks, RFID-based electronic tolling and a crossing time of about seven minutes.

On the highway network, the Narayanghat-Butwal four-laning of the East-West Highway was nearing completion in 2026, the Asian Development Bank has approved a 195 million US dollar loan to upgrade the Pokhara-Mugling road, and in June 2026 the government unveiled a plan for eight tourist highways totalling about 3,000 km at an estimated Rs 600 billion. These are high-capacity mixed-traffic highways rather than access-controlled expressways, but together with the Fast Track they define the next decade of Nepali road building - and the benchmarks against which future expressway promises should be judged.