SP Ring Road Six-Laning: Ahmedabad's Rs 2,000 Crore Traffic Fix

The Ahmedabad Urban Development Authority (AUDA) is moving ahead with one of the city's most significant infrastructure upgrades in two decades. The Sardar Patel (SP) Ring Road, the 76-km corridor encircling Ahmedabad, is being widened from four lanes to six at an estimated cost of Rs 2,000 crore. AUDA is set to begin the long-awaided expansion work of the Sardar Patel (S.P.) Ring Road by December 7, with most technical procedures now complete, and the project aims to convert the existing four-lane stretch, connecting six National Highways and eleven State Highways, into a six-lane corridor.

The expansion has been split into two packages for execution. The first phase covers a 37-km eastern stretch while the second phase covers a 39-km western stretch, together budgeted at roughly Rs 2,200 crore. Of the total project cost, around Rs 1,200 crore spent by the contractor on the ring road will be reimbursed over the next 15 years through annuity payments, meaning the road is being delivered on an annuity model rather than a straight toll-funded build.

This isn't the first attempt to widen the ring road. AUDA had approved a Rs 200-crore widening plan back in 2019, but the deal collapsed in 2021 when AUDA would not extend the toll concession, prompting the original contractor to walk away and stalling the project for years. The current push, re-tendered in February 2025 with a foundation stone laid in August 2025, finally moved into construction with formal work beginning in December 2025.

A key advantage of this expansion is that it needs no fresh land acquisition. AUDA will not need to acquire new land for the project; instead, the existing 60-meter-wide road will be utilised for the expansion, with the new design featuring three lanes on each side while maintaining the service roads. The plan also includes two new flyovers, at Aslali Junction and the Dholera Expressway junction, along with an upgrade of the Tragad underpass to six lanes.

The scale of the traffic problem explains the urgency. The S.P. Ring Road currently carries around one lakh vehicles every day, making the upgradation essential to ease traffic congestion and enhance road safety. The corridor links major nodes including Vaishnodevi, Chandkheda, Gota, Shela-South Bopal, Sanand, Naroda, and Zundal, so a bottleneck here has ripple effects across the entire city's commute patterns.

For homebuyers and investors, the areas best placed to gain are Vaishnodevi Circle, Chandkheda, Gota, Shela–South Bopal, the Sanand–Sanathal industrial belt, Naroda–Nikol–Hathijan, and the newer Kalol growth corridor, though a wider road alone won't push up prices everywhere, and it works best where jobs, schools, and real buyer demand already exist. This mirrors what happened when the original ring road opened in 2004 and gradually anchored two decades of residential and industrial growth around it.

The upgrade also strengthens the business case for large-format industrial and mixed-use developments already anchored along the corridor, such as Mahindra's own Origins by Mahindra, Ahmedabad, a 340-acre industrial land cluster developed in partnership with the International Finance Corporation. Better connectivity along the ring road directly benefits such logistics-and-manufacturing hubs by cutting freight movement time to national highway networks.

AUDA has been careful to flag execution discipline as construction rolls out. AUDA officials said efforts will be made to ensure that commuters face minimal inconvenience during the construction phase, a signal that phased execution and service-road continuity will be prioritised as work progresses toward the end-2026 target.