One-way or two-way, no way out at RTR

NEW DELHI: A jittery forest department has been sitting on the PWD’s request for cutting 319 trees for the parallel flyover project at RTR. Sources say that amicus curie Kailash Vasudev’s submission in court earlier this month, in a case not related to RTR, that one lakh trees have been cut over the past 10 years for Metro and PWD projects and the corresponding compensatory plantation has not taken place has alarmed forest officials.
“In the past few years, it has been found that in the preliminary inspection itself, the forest department has been able to save some trees that would have otherwise been axed. It is, therefore, exercising caution before giving permission, especially now that the court has its eye on the matter,” said sources.
But that’s not the only thing that’s holding up the project. Agencies like MTNL, Delhi Jal Board, municipal corporations and GAIL too have been slow in shifting their cables and pipelines that are coming in the way. They were informed about the project by the end of 2013 and should have done the needful within two months. “More than a year later, these agencies have suddenly claimed that PWD should pay them for the work. We have sent them reminders but work has been extremely slow,” said a PWD official.
In 2007, PWD proposed to construct a flyover here which, due to certain vested interests, was reduced to a half flyover. Even before it was completed in 2010, it became evident that this project would only increase congestion. It was later decided to construct a parallel flyover but the same people who had resisted a full flyover earlier since it would have encroached on their service lane went to court. The project had then got stalled with its cost going up to Rs 211 crore. If a full flyover had been constructed initially, it would have been completed within Rs 100 crore, according to official estimates.
The RTR nuisance is a story of bad planning and the consequence of giving in to pressure groups. Constructed as part of the Commonwealth Games projects at a cost of Rs 59.60 crore, it was originally planned as a normal two-way flyover but then reduced to a three-lane one-way flyover because of a series of objections. What followed was quite predictable: regular traffic snarls.
After huge bottlenecks were reported at the grade level from IIT to airport, the traffic flow on the flyover was reversed to IIT to airport. Similar bottlenecks now resulted in front of Army Research and Referral Hospital. It was finally decided that the carriageway be made two-way, resulting in only one-and-a-half lanes available in each direction. Since then many traffic experiments have been carried out here.
The new flyover will be on a portal structure in order to minimize traffic disruption at the ground level by allowing two lanes of traffic on the ground to pass through. Also, an underpass will be built on the Benito Juarez Marg-Ring Road junction to divert traffic from RTR.