Mumbai: At the southernmost tip of Mumbai, its two promontories — Colaba and Nariman Point — house important business commercial centres, are significant to a lot of the Maharashtra government’s administrative activities and are home to some of the most elite, most expensive residences.
Geographically, the distance between Colaba and Nariman Point is a little over a kilometre but the traveling distance between the two points using the city’s road network is almost five kilometres and can take well over 20 minutes during peak traffic.
So, the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) is now working on reviving an old project to establish a direct link between Colaba and Nariman Point, which will cut the distance to 1.6 km and travel time to just five minutes.
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The new connector
The MMRDA last week appointed a project management consultant for the new connector, who has been tasked with formulating detailed plans within four months.
“The appointed consultant will be responsible for preparing a detailed project report, suggesting alignment, conducting a traffic survey and studying about necessary permissions that need to be obtained for carrying out the project,” an MMRDA official, who did not wish to be named, said.
The 1.6 km connecting bridge will be built over the Arabian Sea, and the consultant will determine the project cost and also oversee the tendering process.
As of now, without the direct link, a single road — Captain Prakash Pethe Marg — has to bear the traffic load between the two points.
The new connector, which the government has termed as “the missing link,” will eventually feed into the coastal road being built from Nariman Point to Worli.
The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) is building the coastal road between the two points by boring an under-sea tunnel and reclaiming land. Work on the multi-crore project has been underway since 2019 and the BMC is targeting a deadline of July 2023 to complete the project.
Old project, false starts
According to the MMRDA, Lea Associates, a private infrastructure development company, had submitted traffic survey reports between 2005 and 2008 in which the agency had recommended the construction of a bridge between Colaba and Nariman Point.
The MMRDA first took up the project for implementation in 2008. However, with then Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh-led state government keen on a holistic redevelopment project for the entire Nariman Point area, the connector was put on hold.
In 2010, with the Nariman Point makeover project also being slow to take off, the MMRDA made a renewed push for the Colaba-Nariman Point connector, planning a road for which the authority would have had to reclaim land.
But the initial activity at getting the project started eventually died down amid opposition to reclamation from certain sections of the society. Meanwhile, the Nariman Point makeover project also did not see the light of day.
After CM Uddhav Thackeray took charge in November 2019, one of his first suggestions for infrastructure development in Mumbai was to bring the connector back from cold storage and plan it as a bridge on stilts or an elevated road.
His son, Aaditya Thackeray, a cabinet minister and the guardian minister for Mumbai’s suburbs, has been especially following up on the project with the MMRDA, officials said.
(Edited by Arun Prashanth)
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