Bengaluru: Legislators from Karnataka’s ruling BJP want the state’s B.S. Yediyurappa government to revive a Rs 26,000-crore elevated corridor project that they believe will resolve much of state capital Bengaluru’s notorious traffic woes. It’s the same project that the BJP had aggressively opposed on account of its alleged environmental toll when the erstwhile Congress-Janata Dal (Secular) government gave it a green signal in 2018.
The BJP was among the most vocal opponents of the project as they said it would take a toll on the environment.
The tender process was subsequently cancelled by the succeeding Yediyurappa government over alleged “irregularities”.
Now, a group of nine Bengaluru city MLAs, led by Deputy Chief Minister Dr Ashwath Narayana, has decided to approach the state government in a bid to get its nod for the 87-kilometre project.
They submitted a proposal in this regard to the Chief Minister’s Office Thursday, a day after they got together to discuss the project at length.
The legislators want Chief Minister Yediyurappa to allocate funds for the first phase of this corridor when his government presents the budget on 5 March.
The first phase seeks to ease connectivity between Yeshwantpur and K.R. Puram, two of the most congested areas in the city.
It will cost an estimated Rs 9,300 crore and cover areas over a 25-km stretch, including Halasuru, Cantonment, Mekhri Circle and Yeshwantpur.
With six lanes, Narayana said, the corridor may be multi-level over certain stretches based on the land gradient (or slope) and the green cover.
“The corridor will bring down the travel time to just half an hour and ease traffic congestion across the city,” Narayana told reporters after the meeting.
As of now, the travel time on the stretch is one to two hours.
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A traffic nightmare
Bengaluru is probably as infamous for its traffic as it’s famous for being a hub of industry.
It was recently identified as the most traffic-congested city in the world in a survey conducted by TomTom, a Netherlands-based global provider of navigation, traffic and map products.
According to the study, a driver in Bengaluru spends 71 per cent of extra travel time, on average, stuck in traffic — this means a travel time of 60 minutes goes up by 43 minutes.
The country’s startup hub beat 415 other cities across 57 countries to top the list.
On average, experts say, Bengaluru has 80 lakh registered private vehicles on the road every day. Compared to this, there are 6,500 public transport buses. The Bengaluru Metro service only caters to 4.5 lakh people.
At Wednesday’s closed-door meeting, the MLAs, including four ministers, discussed technical details and the blueprint for the project prepared by engineers at the Karnataka Road Development Corporation Limited (KRDCL), the department that had first proposed the idea back in 2006.
The MLAs have decided to suggest phase-wise implementation of the project over the next 10 years as building the entire corridor at once might prove unsustainable for the cash-strapped state government.
The controversy
The elevated corridor project was first mooted 15 years ago, when the KRDCL presented the plan to then chief minister H.D. Kumaraswamy, who was heading a BJP-JDS coalition government at the time.
The project did not take off until the idea was once again revived by Kumaraswamy in his next term in 2018, when his JD(S) formed government in alliance with the Congress.
He revived the idea soon after another infrastructure project, a Rs 18,000 crore, 6.5-km steel flyover mooted by the previous Congress government, was shelved following massive opposition from the public over environmental concerns. Environmentalists claimed that the project would entail the destruction of a part of Bengaluru’s green cover, including 800 trees.
In the 2018 budget, Kumaraswamy allocated Rs 1,000 crore for seven projects under elevated corridor initiative, but protests followed again, with even the BJP taking to the streets.
When Yediyurappa took office later the same year, he called time on the project with the following statement: “The KRDCL had planned an elevated corridor road of total 87.87 km to solve the traffic problem. They invited tender for the first 21.54 km under 3 packages which would cost Rs 6,885 cr approx.
“Media and others have claimed that there are irregularities in the tender process and project execution plan and hence the above-mentioned tender… has been cancelled. The KRDCL has been ordered to make a new plan with practical approximate expenditure.”
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‘Bengaluru needs strong public transport’
Citizen groups are still opposed to the project, and leading the charge for “#ElevatedCorridorBeda (don’t want the elevated corridor)” campaign is the NGO Citizens for Bengaluru.
“It is unfortunate… The government has been ill-advised to moot the elevated corridor project again. What Bengaluru needs today is a stronger mass public transport system,” said Srinivas Alvalli of Citizens for Bengaluru.
“We are not opposing the flyovers just for the sake of it, but… the city is dotted with flyovers already and it has not resolved the traffic problems. Instead of focusing on a strong public transport system, the government is back on its old track of building flyovers. We will come to the streets again to protest.”
The fact that Bengaluru’s congestion problem couldn’t be solved by flyovers was echoed by India’s ‘Metro Man’ E. Sreedharan and urban planner Naresh Narasimhan.
“A flyover or elevated corridor would again mean it would be used by private vehicles. There is a need to develop a strong mass rapid transit system,” said Sreedharan. “If there are areas and roads that are highly congested and with serious bottlenecks, then flyovers can help ease the traffic flow.”
Narasimhan added that “it was the poverty of imagination of the politicians to think that… flyovers… will be able to solve the traffic problem”. “They need to build a robust mass transit system with a focus on buses,” he added, saying constructing an elevated corridor is like “trying to solve obesity by loosening the belt”.
Urban mobility expert B.N. Srihari, however, said the elevated corridor may be a good option for now, when Bengaluru as a city is “growing vertically, horizontally and radially”.
“The elevated corridor will facilitate traffic and give seamless connectivity across the city. It is a good step, but every part of Bengaluru cannot be covered by the elevated corridor alone,” he added. “We also need a better network of peripheral and outer ring roads to tackle the traffic problem.”
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THE BJP STANDS EXPOSED AS A PARTY WITH NO PRINCIPLES OR COMMITMENT TO GENERAL PUBLIC WEAL . THE ELEVATED CORRIDOR PROJECT IS NOTHING BUT A HUMONGOUS REAL ESTATE DEAL AIMED AT FEATHERING NESTS OF POLITICIANS INVESTED IN LAND IN &AROUND BENGALURU. THERE ARE WHISPERS THAT THE OLD ALIGNMENT FAVOURED POLITICIANS FROM THE JD(S) AND THE NEW ALIGNMENT FAVOURS THE ONES FROM THE BJP . ALSO , HUGE AGITATIONS WERE ORGANIZED BY THE BJP AGAINST STEEL FLY OVER PROJECT INITIATED BY THE SIDDARAMAIH GOVERNMENT MAKING SIDDARAMAIH GOVERNMENT SCRAP THE PROJECT ON WHICH THE WORK HAS BEGUN RECENTLY AND GOING ON AT A BRISK PACE . EITHER PEOPLE HAD BEEN FOOLED EARLIER OR WILLING PROMOTERS OF THE BJP AT THE EXPENSE OF THE CITY OF BENGALURU . SIMULTANEOUS TO ALL THESE PROJECTS IS AN INCREASE IN FLOOR-SPACE-RATIO ORDERED BY THE GOVERNMENT TO MORE THAN NULLIFY THE UTILITY OF THE PROJECTS SPECIOUSLY TROTTED OUT AS IN GRETAER PUBLIC WEAL . THE BJP IN ITS NEW INNINGS – AS PER WHISPERS SUPPORTED BY LEADERS LIKE SIDDARAMAIAH- SEEM HAVE FOUND INGENIOUS MEANS & WAYS OF LOOTING EXCHEQUER AT PUBLIC EXPENSE