LUCKNOW: The widening of the 178-km national highway to Varanasi is set to miss its deadline of May 2018, but Prime Minister Narendra Modi has directed Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath and Union road transport and highways minister Nitin Gadkari that the .`2,200-crore project should be completed before the 2019 general elections.The PM, who represents Varanasi in Lok Sabha, would contest again from the constituency in the next election, BJP president Amit Shah recently said.At a recent meeting in Delhi, chaired by the PM, the progress of the four-laning of National Highway 233 from Ghaghra Bridge in Basti district to Varanasi was discussed, among other pending projects, and it was discovered that the project was moving too slow to meet the deadline fixed by the road transport and highways ministry.The Union ministry blamed the UP government for its failure to acquire and hand over some of the land required for the project, besides not disbursing the compensation amount to many landowners.“Prime Minister Modi instructed the UP government representative at the meeting to do the needful at once and complete the project before the Lok Sabha polls,” an official privy to the details of the meeting told ET on condition of anonymity.Work on the road project, the biggest in UP at present, had begun in December 2015 after the Centre took charge of completing it within 30 months as it took as much as six hours to cover a distance of about 178 km on the clogged two-lane national highway. The highway passes through Basti, Azamgarh, Jaunpur and Varanasi districts.The PM also instructed the Union ministry, which had divided the project into three stretches, to complete the first stretch by October this year and the other two stretches by March 2019, the official said.The first stretch of 60 km was to be completed at a cost of .`674 crore by May while the other two stretches of similar length were to be completed by June at cost of .`741 crore and .`785 crore, respectively. The project will miss the deadlines for all the three stretches.