New Delhi: With Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressing strong displeasure over the inordinate delay in the take off of the ambitious 14-laning NH-24 project, Cabinet Secretary P.K. Sinha has directed both the Centre and the AAP government to immediately remove “eight major bottlenecks” in the national capital.
Soon after Mr Modi rapped the authorities for not doing proper groundwork before he laid the foundation stone of the project, various concerned agencies have now identified the bottlenecks like shifting of five slum clusters with more than 1,500 jhuggis; private residential properties both on the right and left hand side of the ROW (right of way); construction of a bridge over Yamuna for which permission is yet to be obtained; dismantling deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia’s office which falls on NH 24 and shifting of basic utility services such as DJB pipelines, transmission line of BSES, 220 KV lines of Transco, and other religious structures. The project is expected to help about 1.5 lakh car commuters on a daily basis. The total area of Delhi’s portion of the project is 8.7 km stretch of the 96 km Expressway.
A copy of the document pertaining to the project accessed by this newspaper revealed that there are several private residential buildings on ROW while several similar structures inside ROW of the National Highway 24. Besides Nehru Camp Jhuggis, Patparganj with 1,500 dwelling units exist within 90 metre on ROW of NH-24. The Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board has been directed to submit proposal for rehabilitation of the jhuggi dwellers within two weeks. The document said: “There are also several nurseries of the MCDs that fall outside ROW of NHAI and these are expected to be shifted in four weeks. Another slum, Jai Bharti camp with 1100 jhuggis, also falls on the ROW of NHAI-24. There are also L&T camps at Junction of UP Link Road -NH-24 and NH 24-Ring Road. And at both the locations, the batch mixing plant and casting yard has been set up for construction of Barapullah elevated corridor Phase III by Public Works Department (PWD) of the Delhi government.”
The deputy chief minister’s office also falls under ROW of NHAI and the same needs to be removed. The PWD chief engineer has reportedly assured that these structures would be cleared within the next four weeks. Another bottleneck is the construction of a bridge over the Yamuna River at Nizamuddin as a part of the Delhi Meerut Expressway. The concerned agencies have yet to give clearance for a Yamuna over bridge as the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) has not given clearance for land for the bridge project.
