Expressway stuck in land jam

Expressway stuck in land jam
Decan HErald

If missing road links on the 41-km Peripheral Road connecting Hosur Road with Tumkur Road are any indication, many a roadblock would have to be removed before the 111-km expressway connecting Bangalore and Mysore becomes a reality.

The Supreme Court’s nod to the construction of the Bangalore Mysore Infrastructure Corridor may have given the corridor promoters — Nandi Infrastructure Corridor Enterprise (NICE) – moral high ground. But on ground zero, work on the corridor continues to be entangled in land transfer issues.

If missing road links on the 41-km Peripheral Road connecting Hosur Road with Tumkur Road are any indication, many a roadblock would have to be removed before the 111-km expressway connecting Bangalore and Mysore becomes a reality.

As Deccan Herald witnessed when it hit the road on Saturday and covered close to 25 km (from Mysore Road Interchange on SH 17 to Hosur Road Interchange on NH 7), construction is limited to the stretch close to the Hosur Road Interchange, near Electronic City. There’s no land to work on, according to NICE officials.


“We need an excess of 900 acres of land to complete the interchanges and missing road links. However, the land transfer is just not happening,” says Manjunath Nayaker, Deputy General Manager, NICE.

The Peripheral Road passes through eight interchanges — at Tumkur Road, Magadi Road, Mysore Road, Somapura (the completed NICE clover-leaf interchange), Kanakapura Road, Bannerghatta Road, an interchange near PES College and Hosur Road.

Road alignment

While issues over encroachment of social forest land in Hemmigepura have cut into the expressway before the Somapura Interchange, land transfer for the proposed Bannerghatta Road Interchange has been stalled following the Karnataka State Pollution Control Board’s withdrawal of consent based on alleged deviation in road alignment. “We had changed the initial plan to avoid digging up the Gottigere lakebed. We are now being targeted for that,” says Nayaker.

According to NICE officials, the road alignment issue has been raked up to “protect” a property owned by a former KAS officer near the lake, at the Bannerghatta Road Interchange. They point out that interchanges are not isolated pockets where land issues have cropped up.

NICE officials allege that on the 12-km stretch from Somapura Interchange to Bidadi (the road that signals the end of the first phase of the project), work has been complete only on six kilometres because lands have not been transferred to NICE. The proposed Kanakapura Road Interchange is running short on land for the exit ramp. Land has been the major issue hampering work on other interchanges as well, according to them.