How underpass will shorten IGI ride from south Delhi

NEW DELHI: Come March 2019, your travel from South Delhi to international airport via Vasant Kunj will be smoother and about 30 minutes shorter during peak hours.
In what would bring relief to flyers, the Central Public Works Department (CPWD) on Tuesday started work on building an underpass connecting the Mahipalpur bypass with Aerocity, a bridge in the airport area and a single carriageway flyover at the junction of Vasant Kunj road and Mahipalpur bypass.
Laying the foundation stone, housing and urban affairs minister Hardeep Singh Puri said the project was approved as a part of the Centre’s plan to decongest some of the key areas in the national capital. Puri said though the original plan was 80% funding from the Centre and the rest from Delhi government, now the ministry will foot the entire bill.
CPWD chief engineer Rajeev Singhal said the road development project includes a host of interventions that will take care of traffic movement between Vasant Kunj and airport.
Moreover, a loop and a U-turn are being built for seamless traffic flow towards Dhaula Kuan and Gurgaon. “The project has been designed to avoid traffic taking the congested Mahipalpur village, which is a major bottleneck,” said a government official.
As per the plan, a nine-meter flyover will be built at the junction of Vasant Kunj Pocket-E and Mahipalpur bypass for traffic coming from the Mehrauli side. For non-stop traffic flow to and from airport, a double carriageway underpass will be built beneath the NH-8 near the National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) building.
Officials said the composite traffic solution will help decongest the Mahipalpur road and the service lane of NH-8 in these stretches.
This was one of the projects that a high-powered committee, set up by the urban development ministry in October 2014, had suggested to decongest the national capital. Following the recommendations, the government had announced an assistance of Rs 3,250 crore from the Urban Development Fund (UDF) in November 2015 for undertaking junction improvements, providing missing links and removing choking points in Delhi.
Though the improvement of road networks in this area was to be taken up by the Delhi PWD, it could not start as the city government did not sanction its share of the cost. “We then decided to sanction the entire cost of the project and assigned the work to CPWD in October 2017,” Puri said.