Little has been done to address the hurdles to the widening of the narrow Varthur Road, a bottleneck connecting Varthur to the rest of the city. The contract was awarded nearly one-and-a-half years ago and the work should have been completed by now.
Fed up with the narrow road, a school van driver recently sat on a hunger strike to protest the tardiness on the part of the civic body.
The delay is being attributed to the civic body's inability to acquire land required to widen the road, which BBMP claims to have sorted out now. However, it is yet to address concerns that the project will further damage the lake ecosystem.
“There has been no public consultation. Drawings of the design and alignment of the proposed road have not been made public. Residents and environmental activists have to be consulted over the design,” said V. Ramprasad, convenor, Friends of Lakes.
Questions are also being raised over whether the road can be widened as it falls within the 75-metre buffer zone of the lake, in light of the May 2016 National Green Tribunal order.
“We want the road to be widened, but in a transparent manner,” said Jagadish Reddy of Varthur Rising.
An official said, “We are widening the road from 12 metres to 45 metres.”
A senior BBMP official said the lake eco-system will not be damaged. “The widening work will happen at the opposite end of the tank bund, towards the catchment area and not into the lake. Moreover, the road has been there for several decades. Widening does not violate the NGT order,” said the official.
On the issue of compensation, BBMP officials said that while landowners had been demanding cash the civic body will only offer Transferable Development Rights (TDR). “We have convinced most of the land-owners to give up land for TDR. Taking TDR will only help land-owners monetise that land which they cannot use,” he explained.
However, land-owners are yet to give acceptance of TDR in writing and hand over possession of land to the BBMP.