GT Road (Pakistan)

The GT Road located in Pakistan is the former part of Grand Trunk Road (formerly known as Uttarapath, Sadak-e-Azam, Shah Rah-e-Azam, Badshahi Sadak, and Long Walk)[1] is one of Asia's oldest and longest major roads. For at least 2,500 years[2] it has linked Central Asia to the Indian subcontinent. It runs roughly 3,655 km (2,271 mi)[3] from Teknaf, Bangladesh on the border with Myanmar[4][5] west to Kabul, Afghanistan, passing through Chittagong and Dhaka in Bangladesh, Kolkata, Kanpur, Agra, Aligarh, Delhi, Amritsar, Chandigarh, Prayagraj in India, and Lahore, Rawalpindi, and Peshawar in Pakistan.[6][1]

History

British Empire

In the 1830s the East India Company started a program of metalled road construction,[7] for both commercial and administrative purposes. The road, now named the Grand Trunk Road, from Calcutta, through Delhi, to Kabul, Afghanistan was rebuilt at a cost of £1000/mile. The road is mentioned in a number of literary works including those of Foster and Rudyard Kipling. Kipling described the road as: "Look! Look again! and chumars, bankers and tinkers, barbers and bunnias, pilgrims – and potters – all the world going and coming. It is to me as a river from which I am withdrawn like a log after a flood. And truly the Grand Trunk Road is a wonderful spectacle. It runs straight, bearing without crowding India's traffic for fifteen hundred miles – such a river of life as nowhere else exists in the world."[8]

Islamic Republic of Pakistan

Main article: N-5 National Highway

The road coincides with the current N-5 (Lahore, Gujranwala, Gujrat, Lalamusa, Kharian, Jhelum, Rawalpindi, Peshawar and Khyber Pass towards Jalalabad in Afghanistan) in Pakistan[9][10] and AH1 (Torkham-Jalalabad to Kabul) to Ghazni in Afghanistan.

Part of the highway was built on the ancient Grand Trunk Road (commonly known as G.T. Road) which came under jurisdiction of the new state after the independence of Pakistan in 1947.[11] The historical Grand Trunk Route extended from Wagha, Punjab to Peshawar, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The original highways were Peshawar-Torkham Road, Grand Trunk Road (Peshawar-Lahore), Lahore-Multan Road, Multan-Bahawalpur Road, KLP Road (Bahawal Pur-Rahim Yar Khan), Karachi-Rahim Yar Khan Road.

The federal government has approved a major upgrade of the Grand Trunk (G.T.) Road (N-5) for conversion into a uniform three-lane carriageway.[9][10]

See also

Modern roads in Asia

  • AH1, or Asian Highway 1 – the longest route of the Asian Highway Network, running from Japan to Turkey
  • Asian Highway Network (AH), aka the Great Asian Highway - project to improve the highway systems in Asia
Afghanistan
Pakistan
India

Notes


References

  1. ^ a b "Sites along the Uttarapath, Badshahi Sadak, Sadak-e-Azam, Grand Trunk Road". UNESCO World Heritage Centre. Archived from the original on 17 January 2018. Retrieved 26 December 2018.
  2. ^ UNESCO, Caravanserais along the Grand Trunk Road in Pakistan Archived 31 May 2019 at the Wayback Machine
  3. ^ Tayler, Jeffrey (November 1999). "The Atlantic: "India's Grand Trunk Road"". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on 7 September 2020. Retrieved 7 March 2017.
  4. ^ Steel, Tim (1 January 2015). "A road to empires". Dhaka Tribune. Archived from the original on 11 February 2016. Retrieved 19 July 2016.
  5. ^ Jhimli Mukherjee Pandey (15 September 2015). "Cuisine along G T Road". The Times of India. Calcutta. Archived from the original on 5 January 2017. Retrieved 19 July 2016.
  6. ^ Khanna, Parag. "How to Redraw the World Map". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on 19 August 2016. Retrieved 19 July 2016.
  7. ^ "Metalled". www.designingbuildings.co.uk. Retrieved 2025-04-21.
  8. ^ A description of the road by Kipling, found both in his letters and in the novel Kim Archived 24 September 2015 at the Wayback Machine.
  9. ^ a b Reporter, The Newspaper's Staff (2025-04-20). "Government greenlights upgradation of G.T. Road to three-lane carriageway". DAWN.COM. Retrieved 2025-04-21.
  10. ^ a b Khattak, Arsalan (2025-04-20). "GT Road is Getting a Major Motorway-Like Upgrade". ProPakistani. Retrieved 2025-04-21.
  11. ^ The Concept N5 Highway Pakistan (GT Road). Raja Afsar Khan. 1999. p. 24. Retrieved 2024-10-19.
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