Infrastructure vows & woes

Infrastructure vows & woes
Problems galore on 19 roads
Everything looks rosy. Dream infrastructure projects on the anvil. Like 5 elevated expressways and escalators in crowded areas. Nineteen ‘privileged’ roads getting a facelift. Private players want to chip in and improve urban hardware. Yet, there are hitches. Projects rarely take off the ground. This is the ground reality.

The Times of India

Bangalore: Nineteen ‘privileged’ roads being done up in such a way as to replicate and even better the showpiece M G Road. But what greeted the inspection team on Thursday on some of these roads was appalling: encroachments by chai-kadais and vendors, newly laid pavements dug up by utility providers and telecom companies.

As a follow-up to Wednesday’s meeting between civic stake-holders and chief secretary B K Das, the BMP in tandem with infrastructure committee members undertook an impromptu inspection of these specific roads along the ‘IT-BT’ roads in the south and south-east Bangalore.

Explaining about the identified roads, BMP additional commissioner Gaurav Gupta said, “These stretches hitherto never boasted of good roads. Now the footpaths have been upgraded and we are laying out layers of thickness so that they can withstand high-density traffic which is a perennial problem on these roads.’’

For the record, these 19 roads in the initial scheme of things had a deadline gone past. “A section of the IT companies and builders who had been entrusted with these roads, backed out in the last moment, so we had to start afresh,’’ reasoned BMP officials.

This time around, they are not taking any chances. Once the roads are declared done by the BMP in tandem with the KLAC (Karnataka Land Army Corporation), the highcourt appointed panel on roads will inspect them and deem them standard roads fit for high density traffic.

But will the roads be done at all? For instance, even as the official inspection was on, some Bescom workers were apprehended digging furiously at a freshly laid pavement on 80 feet Road in Indiranagar and at a stretch at Jeevanbimanagar.

NOW, ESCALATORS?
Chief minister H D Kumaraswamy on Thursday directed the BMP to construct escalators instead of skywalks in crowded areas of the city. Skywalks were very steep to climb and would put elders, people with poor health and handicapped at a disadvantage. “It is very difficult for them to climb such skywalks, so I have asked the BMP to construct escalators wherever there is a floating population,’’ he pointed out.

Jayanagar IV Block, K G Road and Malleswaram are among at least 20 areas where the CM has suggested such escalators be built.