The Road That Finally Goes Around Kallar Kahar

Anyone who has driven the M2 between Lahore and Islamabad knows the stretch near Kallar Kahar by feel before they know it by name. The road climbs and twists through the Salt Range, and for heavy trucks running through the night it has long been one of the more dangerous sections of any motorway in the country. So there’s something genuinely worth paying attention to in the M13 Kharian to Rawalpindi Motorway, which is now finally moving after years of being stuck in planning limbo.

Under sustained coordination from the Special Investment Facilitation Council, the project has gone from a stalled four lane proposal to a fully redesigned 117.2 kilometre, six lane motorway. The contract has gone to the Frontier Works Organisation, the engineering outfit behind some of Pakistan’s toughest infrastructure builds, and it’s being fast tracked rather than left to crawl through the usual procedural pace.

What makes this more than just another road project is what it actually does to the journey. The M13 will shave nearly 100 kilometres off the Lahore to Islamabad route and cut travel time by roughly an hour. And instead of sending traffic up and over the gradients at Kallar Kahar, the new alignment runs through three purpose built tunnels across the Salt Range. That’s a real engineering response to a problem that has cost lives for years, not a detail added in for the press release.

There’s also a numbers case here that’s hard to argue with. Officials looked at what it would cost to widen the road later, once traffic outgrows four lanes, probably around 2027, and the figure came to roughly Rs20.7 billion. Building it as six lanes now instead adds about Rs9.5 billion to the upfront cost. Do the subtraction and the country comes out close to Rs11 billion ahead. It’s the sort of decision that barely gets noticed when it’s made and looks obviously right a decade later.

SIFC’s reach goes well past the M13. Its involvement was what got the M12, the 69 kilometre Sialkot to Kharian motorway, moving again after construction had been completely frozen since October 2024 over financing and design disputes. Work resumed there in February 2026. Around the same time, the existing M11 Lahore to Sialkot Motorway, a four lane road that’s been running since 2020, started being widened to six lanes as well. None of these three projects is really standalone. Put together, they form one continuous six lane corridor stretching from Lahore through Sialkot and Kharian into Rawalpindi.

That’s the part that should matter most to anyone thinking about where Pakistan’s traffic is actually headed. Once the M11, M12 and M13 corridor is fully open, officials expect somewhere between 50 and 60 percent of the traffic currently using the M2 between Lahore and Rawalpindi to shift onto it, pulling pressure off the older route while giving freight operators a faster, safer alternative. The corridor runs close to the GT Road and right past Sialkot’s export industries, and on paper it extends further still, toward Peshawar, and from there toward Afghanistan, China through the Khunjerab Pass, and into Central Asia. That’s a genuinely useful trade corridor, not just a commuter shortcut. Shorter routes and fewer hours stuck in traffic also mean less fuel burned and a smaller carbon footprint across the network, and those savings only grow the longer the corridor stays in use.

Put the M11, M12 and M13 together and it’s arguably the most coherent piece of motorway planning Pakistan has managed in years: shorter, faster, safer through the one stretch that’s claimed the most lives, and built for the traffic the region is growing into rather than the traffic it already has. For a country whose infrastructure plans usually move slower than its ambitions, this one’s worth watching, and worth welcoming.