ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Friday inaugurated the Gwadar Eastbay Expressway, which connects the southwestern Pakistani port city to the country’s financial hub of Karachi.
The 19-kilometer-long, six-lane Eastbay Expressway was built in three years with a cost of Rs32 billion ($162 million). It connects the remote Gwadar port in the impoverished Balochistan province with Karachi in the southern Pakistani province of Sindh through the Makran Coastal Highway.
The primary objective of the expressway is to provide connectivity to the port and its special economic zone with the network of national highways for smooth transportation of import, export and transit goods.
“Today, we have inaugurated the Eastbay motorway constructed by China and it has been completed,” PM Sharif told attendees at the inauguration ceremony in Gwadar.
“This Eastbay will be linked to the highway to transport goods up till Karachi.”
Similarly, the prime minister said, China had arranged for a desalination plant, established a hospital and provided solar panels to 3,200 families in Gwadar.
Gwadar, a fishing town in southwest Pakistan, lies at the heart of multi-billion-dollar China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), part of China’s wider Belt and Road Initiative to forge “Silk Road” land and sea routes to markets in the Middle East and Europe.
Beijing has undertaken several infrastructure and energy projects in Pakistan under the CPEC.
