RANI JHANSI FLYOVER THROWN OPEN
NEW DELHI: After missing nine deadlines, the Rani Jhansi grade separator was finally thrown open to the public on Tuesday by Union Environment Minister Harsh Vardhan.
The six-lane, 1.8-km ambitious flyover project in North Delhi, will provide connectivity between St Stephen’s Hospital near the Tis Hazari court complex, and Filmstan Cinema. It will also provide a link with the intersections for Baraf Khana, DCM chowk, Azad market and Subzi Mandi areas of the city.
The six-lane gradeseparator was conceived 22 years ago to decongest the stretch between Pusha road and ISBT Kashmere Gate. While The North Municipal Corporation had started Rani Jhansi Flyover grade separator in 2008 with the project cost pegged at Rs 122 crore, which has since escalated to Rs 825 crore in the past eight years.
The Rani Jhansi Flyover grade separator project ran into legal troubles soon after the work started in 2008. The project which was supposed to be completed by September 2010 remained stuck in limbo. With officials saying that the project faced several technical glitches and poor coordination among land agencies for acquisition of land from the railways, the project
cost escalated by 50 per cent, the North Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC) was thinking of either realigning the project or scrapping it altogether.
Despite missing multiple deadlines since the laying of its foundation stone nearly a decade ago, the Union government ensured that funding should not come in the way of completion of this much-needed flyover, said Harsh Vardhan.
“Nearly 43 per cent of the construction work was done in the last one year and though we faced lot of challenges in construction of this separator, we kept working on the project and finally it is ready for citizens. Not only it will benefit nearly 5 lakh commuters daily
but a free flow of traffic would help in reducing pollution and save fuel as well,” added Vardhan
Also present at the inauguration was Union Minister of Housing and Urban Affairs Hardeep Singh Puri. He said that when finances became a bottleneck in completion of the project, the ministry decided that 80 per cent of the funding will come through the Urban Development Fund (UDF) and 20 per cent of the fund will be borne by Delhi Development Authority (DDA).
“The Union Government is aggressively spearheading a series of pending projects in Delhi and all such projects will be completed by March 2019,” said Puri.