A new six-lane road just got approved to be built in Vrindavan, and the villages that are about to be affected by it shall first experience it.
While I'm not sure if it was given all the credit it deserves elsewhere in the area, there's something in the local Vrindavan grapevine that has not had the attention it deserves right now. The Union Ministry of Road Transport and Highways has approved a new six-lane road between village Jait on the national highway and directly to the Yamuna Expressway. This is a notification that is reportedly going the rounds on social media, and this is the sort of quiet infrastructure approval that sees property in Vrindavan prices galloping ahead of most buyers.
The rationale for the project is simple. For years, pilgrims have been arriving in buses and cars in the temple town, causing serious traffic jams, and the current road network was inadequately designed to handle the pilgrim traffic that the town experiences regularly, let alone during festivals. This is meant to rectify this point straightforwardly and make the roadway a six-lane stretch of the Yamuna Expressway, which will allow devotees arriving from the Yamuna Expressway and the National Highway to get into the city in a congestion-free manner, with the roadway planned to allow direct access to parking areas along the riverbank instead of all proceeding through the same busier expressway lanes.
The route itself is what's really interesting from an investment point of view. The road will traverse some villages and pass through Belwan, Jahangirpur, and Begumpur. People who have seen the process of land acquisition in this region to date know what is likely to follow. After the notification is formally issued, the administration usually starts the land acquisition process and employs surveyors to come into the villages, and the owners of land in the pathway are usually given hefty compensation. That process is generally sufficient to push prices in the adjacent belt well ahead of any single liter of asphalt that goes down.
It's also not just about something they are considering. Those who monitor government building plans with careful eyes have begun to purchase agricultural property along this section to benefit from just such an appreciation, local reports say. That is a trend to take note of, not ignore, since the value of land is one of the more dependable factors in these pilgrim-town growth corridors that are away from the temple's core area and where prices appreciate more slowly than in the vicinity of the temple.
Look past the road itself, and there's another dimension to this. Six lanes of a road that links a huge highway with a religious landmark is not typical. Over time, these stretches will become increasingly "commercialized," with service stations and hospitality emerging along the road, catering to the needs of commuters, and eventually, with residential development because those who want to live close to the highway will not pay the premiums at the edge of the temple. Belwan and Jahangirpur are both very much aligned to this new corridor and can reasonably be expected to experience exactly that kind of secondary development when the project goes from notification to construction.
The sensible strategy for anyone assessing plots or land in this belt now is the same one that would be used for any pre-construction infrastructure story: check the final alignment for the plot/land in question and confirm that it is approved with the appropriate authority, as opposed to relying on hearsay, and look at it as a multi-year positioning move, not a one-night stand. A road such as this usually takes time to get from the Ministry of Transport notification to a road capable of accommodating six lanes of traffic. The villages lining a new bypass road running into one of India's hottest pilgrimage destinations, however, are just the sort of highway that attracts those who are willing to step out on a limb before the construction crews arrive.
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